We are proud to present our interview with Chip Lange, Head of EA Sports Nation and Nathan Fahrenthold, the EA Sports Community Producer.

Operation Sports: Could you give us some details about the “Premium Pass"?

Chip Lange: We feel like the first step was to get people comfortable with the fact that they’re really building up an account with EA – building a “rep” rating, building a sense of persistence behind one account, as opposed to what we’ve seen in past years where people create multiple personas, and when one starts going south – they pull the plug, or play without integrity, they’d just switch to another one. We think this is a first step in moving our gamers towards having an account with persistence value that they’re managing on a long-term basis.

Operation Sports: A la the Xbox Live Gamertag, where you have a single online identity?

Chip Lange: That’s a great analogy; an EBay Power Seller would be another one.

Operation Sports: Will the "Premium Pass" be available for other EA Sports Titles?

Chip Lange: Right now, we’re announcing it for Madden. EA Sports has got a quality threshold that we have to uphold for our users. We’re going to get this thing nailed – absolutely right – with Madden, and then identify where the opportunities are in other sports. There will be a learning experience for both sides - the consumer and EA – while we identify features of high usefulness to the user, and find out where are we are missing on stuff that we need to get our development tracking on for future releases.

Operation Sports: Tell us about the “Premium Pass” business model.

Chip Lange: We decided on the sponsorship model because we think it lets gives customers a chance to experience it and get used to it at no cost to them. Obviously, development has a cost, and at some point we’re going to need to decide what our appropriate business model will be – whether that may be larger sponsorship packages or some sort of subscription. We are trying to develop a suite of features that can be established as “premium”, and activate it through either sponsorship or subscription, but we don’t have a business model, long-term, that we can talk about right now.

Operation Sports: Could you give us some information for online leagues?

Chip Lange: We’re planning on launching at the beginning of the NFL season, roughly the second week of September. I think we’ll be answering what the online community has been asking for during the last two years.

Operation Sports: What about custom rosters?

Nathan Fahrenthold: We really wanted to do it this year, but we weren’t able to. We do have a regular schedule of roster updates. We’re still working on the specifics, but we will definitely have a regular roster update.

Operation Sports: Will there be much of a difference between the Xbox and PS2 online experience?

Chip Lange: The joy of EA is that we’re platform agnostic. So we’re trying to devise a system so all of our users online can experience this joy.

Operation Sports: Thank you for your time, is there anything else you would like to add?

Chip Lange: We’ve got a feature set that was really built by the user base, and they can access these features at the right price this year! We’re looking forward to hearing from the users about these features so we can upgrade them and make it even better moving forward.