Kicking off the gaming day of the Appsworld conference, at Earls Court 2 in London, was EA's Mike McCabe.

The senior director for FIFA in emerging markets, he discussed how mobile is playing its part in the mix of the 14 different platforms the football game is now released across.

Talking about the early days of FIFA on mobile, McCabe compared the 2003 Java version to the just released iOS 2013 version.

"We struggled with early iterations of the product. We weren't able to deliver the authencity we wanted [in the Java days]," he explained.

All grown up

Of course, FIFA 13 is a much more fully fledged game. It's also the first time EA has released a universal build for iOS devices; a 1.4GB download.

EA backs this with a mode that enables you to use your iPhone/iPod touch as a gamepad for the iPad version.

"People wanted to play the same game on iPhone and iPad," McCabe explained. Indeed, with a unified user registration system (EA's Origin), the XP you gain on mobile is accumulated with that earned on console etc.

Early metrics show that players are coming back to the game regularly.

On average, they're playing FIFA 13 5-7 times daily, with the total time of daily play of up to 45 minutes.

Linked together

More generally, the mobile version of FIFA is being treated seriously within EA, with the mobile development team integrated with the console studio.

This has been further extended with the release of EA Sports Football Club; what McCabe called the 'heartbeat of FIFA'.

It's a connected element across the various versions of the games - for players of FIFA to talk about the game and the clubs of which they're fans. It accumulated 13 million players for FIFA 12, with over 5 million console games played daily.

EA Sports Football Club is also supported with mobile companion web-based HTML5 app.

"Previously we incorporated different experiences on different platforms, but we didn't connect them all up," McCabe explained.

"Now we provide a coherent experience across the different platforms."