EA: Woods scandal had no impact on sales

EA Sports president Peter Moore has said that the recent scandal surrounding Tiger Woods' personal life has had no negative impact on sales of his games.

The company recently stated that it would stand by the disgraced sportsman, and has just announced the opening of a beta for its upcoming Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online game.

In an interview with CNBC, Moore said that a new instalment of the series - Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 - would also be released this year.

"We've looked actually at the overall franchise for calendar year 2008 and 2009 and are slightly up when we look at all platforms for the Tiger franchise. Despite what has gone on in his personal life, we've seen no negative impact on sales," said Moore.

According to figures from NPD, sales of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 were down just slightly on the '09 instalment - from 196,000 copies a month to 191,000.

Moore suggested that EA had carried out research on consumers before making the decision to continue as normal with the Woods license - and that the results were overwhelmingly positive.

"We talk to our customers every single day. We take their pulse about a lot of things and in particular, obviously, when there are situations like this in the news. We want to know how they think. It hasn't changed. In fact, it's validated our decision to continue with Tiger at the masthead of our games.

"We stand by Tiger as an athlete – AP's greatest athlete of the decade," said Moore. "This guy, since we signed him to be the lead for our golf products, has won 56 PGA Tour events and we still see him obviously as the world's greatest golfer and continue to stand by him as such."

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