We take it for granted that Madden’s going to come out every August and sell millions of copies. The franchise is more consistent than Brett Favre waffling about whether or not he’s going to retire, and that’s no easy feat.

We spoke to EA Sports Senior Producer Phil Frazier to find out about how the team deals with negative feedback, a tweak that caused problems that took six months to fix, and when they’re going to grace us with a new version of Mutant League Football.

Bitmob: Many people view Madden’s yearly release as a holiday and hit the stores right at midnight to pick it up and be part of the hoopla. Do you get involved in that at all, or do you just view the game’s release as your first chance at a good night of sleep?

Phil Frazier: You know, I wish I could say I slept last night. The reality is, we had a very ambitious feature in this year’s game with online franchise that required service support that we’ve never really provided before with the website, the iPhone application we’re working on, and the console application. We had a small group of people here in the office watching the servers and the great news is, everything performed very nicely.

Bitmob: When you mention sitting around watching the servers, I envision some sort of movie-style Pentagon war room. Is that what it’s like?

PF: Not quite as glitzy as what they make it look like in Hollywood. We’re at our desks and we have a variety of graphs and charts that tell us how many people are on each server, how many folks are creating online franchises, and what’s going on in the online space. On top of that, I spent a lot of time on Madden forums, Operation Sports, and EAsports.com looking for folks who are having issues playing the game.

Funny enough, we actually saw the traffic on our site quadruple precisely at 12:20am, which I guess is just enough time for people to go to the store, buy the game, and get home. That’s when the fun really began.

Bitmob: A big feature this year is online franchise, which people have been clamoring for since the PlayStation 2 days. I know I wish it was around back when I was using a GameShark to transfer email saves. What’s the craziest thing you’ve heard someone do to play an offline Madden franchise?

PF: I think the craziest thing I’ve heard -- and this was back in the PS2 days -- was that people would play their franchise game, save it to a memory card, put that card in an envelope, and then mail it to their friends so that their friends could play their game. When they had a head-to-head matchup they’d actually have to meet in-person to play those games.

Bitmob: What has been the biggest hurdle in getting from playing a football game online, which happened 10 years ago with NFL 2K, to having a true online franchise experience?

PF: It boils down to cost, and cost for us is time. The NFL season does not wait for us, so we’ve got to have the game out in August to satisfy the hunger of all the NFL fans out there. When we start putting design ideas up on the board -- and online franchise has been on our list each and every year -- we struggle as a design team when it comes down to making a decision whether or not you do a feature.

Specifically with online franchise this year, we left out a piece that we’ll definitely get to in the future, but free agency we just weren’t able to fit in there. We literally did not have time to do it. But instead of cutting the mode completely, which has kind of been our procedure before, where we’d say, “Well, we can’t get to everything, let’s not do any of it,” we went ahead and said, “You know what, even without free agency we can make a pretty cool feature. We can still do the web stuff, and we can still do the iPhone stuff.”

This is a feature that has been so popular; it has literally been requested since the PlayStation 2 came about, which I was in 2001. I’m glad we finally got to it.

Bitmob: Another of this year’s big features is Pro Tak. Many games, including yours have promised gang tackles before but have failed to deliver. I could tell within two seconds of seeing it that you guys had actually done it. How did you make such a huge leap with that this year?

PF: That feature and that technology really stems from a single image that we used in a lot of our presentations throughout the year. It was a shot of Eli Manning pushing a pile. He literally had eight or nine different Cowboy players trying to bring him down. We saw this image and we said, “We’ve never been able to capture that moment in Madden before.” Yeah we’ve had gang tackles, but those have been limited to two defenders and one offensive player -- not quite the big scrum that you see every single Sunday when you’re watching the NFL. That was really the moment where we realized that we had to fix this.

The technology is very big, and it took all year for us to develop. It’s an absolutely huge piece of technology for the Madden franchise that we’ll continue to build on for years to come.

Bitmob: You mention Pro Tak being a huge piece of technology, but what’s something that’s relatively minor in comparison that for whatever reason ended up being a large amount of work?

PF: I have a really good example for that. It’s that we slowed down gameplay. We didn’t cut the speed in half; it’s literally a five, maybe ten percent reduction in speed. You’d think that just slowing players down on the field would be pretty straightforward, that maybe you’d just change a number and reduce it by five percent. The reality is that it completely broke our AI system.

Our AI system drives what pursuit angles defenders take and how quickly cornerbacks react once the ball’s in the air. When we slowed the game down, we had to go back to each of the different AI systems and figure out how the new game speed affected all of those systems because it basically made our defense really, really dumb when we first made that switch. We made that change last November, and it took us six months to really iron out all of the kinks.

Bitmob: Now that the game is out, you’re able to get feedback from reviews and consumers. How do you keep yourself from getting emotionally involved when you read negative feedback? Or do you get too involved and let it eat you up if someone spews a bunch of venom?

PF: I’ve been doing this for 12 years, but I’ll admit that the first couple of years I’d see a negative review, and it would literally keep me up at night. I’d be thinking about a couple of quotes from the review, and it would drive me insane. But because I’ve been doing this for such a long time, I’ve learned that even with the negative feedback that you see when you’re on a fan site or a forum, and people are bashing the game, you’ve got to ignore the words and the hate and just focus on the item that they really want to see changed.

With our newer designers, they really struggle with that concept because they worked on this game for a year. But as long as there’s a nugget there that you can take to further improve the game, then it’s still good feedback. You’ve just got to learn to filter out the negativity.

Bitmob: When are we getting a new Mutant League Football?

PF: [Laughs] We actually installed Mutant League the other day, and we were giving it a look. A lot of our artists and a lot of our engineers look back on the Genesis days, and they look back at that game and think that it would be fun to make a game where you can tackle a guy and take his head off.

We’ve certainly talked about it, but at the end of the day our main objective is to make the best, the most accurate, and the most fun version of NFL football we can. If we ever find ourselves a little bit bored we’ll throw a few artists and designers at that and see if they can knock it out.

Bitmob: Xbox Live has ushered in the era of micro transactions. For better or worse, depending on who you talk to, EA has been at the forefront of that movement. Now Madden is receiving criticism for only allowing you to do certain things if you’re willing to pay extra.

Madden is one of the best-selling games ever. Why do you need to make even more money above and beyond the $60 retail cost of the game?

PF: First, I’d like to point out the fact that none of the PDLC [premium downloadable content] that’s out there for Madden -- not a single one -- can be used in an online game with an online franchise. You’ll never run into a situation where this guy from California that’s willing to spend a few more bucks has a competitive advantage against a guy from some other location. We don’t allow that to happen.

A lot of our PDLC in the game is meant to be accelerators that allow you to experience the game in a different way. If you don’t want to play all the way through superstar mode for several years to get your guy to 99 speed or 99 throwing-power, you can just accelerate that mode and have a guy who’s fully maxed-out. If you have a situation in an offline franchise mode where a guy retires, we allow you to cheat a little bit to pay to un-retire the guy.

What’s driving EA and a lot of the industry towards this model is the popularity of online play. We’re now seeing 70 percent of our fans connected online. We don’t charge a subscription fee or anything, but with online there’s a cost.

Over time we’re adding more and more online features like online franchise, online co-op, and almost-weekly roster downloads. These things are meant to sort of stem the cost of bandwidth charges and just to try to make business better as our games get bigger and more costly with regards to network traffic.

All of this stuff is optional. In the case of elite service, this is meant to be a step in the direction of providing more service to our fans. We had some bigger plans for elite that we couldn’t pull off because of some console restrictions, but we want to be able to go to our most hardcore fans and say, “Look, if you’re willing to spend, we’re willing to give you more of a service than you’ve ever had before.”

It’s things like better policing of leader boards, better access to developers, and a secluded environment where you don’t have to worry as much about cheaters because it’s less likely that cheaters are going to spend five bucks to join the service. It’s about providing a different type of environment for those players and a safe place for them to play.

Bitmob: I feel that if most people had the concept of PDLC explained to them like you just did to me, that there would be a lot less outrage because most of it makes a lot of sense. Do you think that EA’s not doing a good job of getting the word out, or do you think the outrage that we see over PDLC is just the nature of the beast?

PF: I think to some degree it’s the nature of the beast. It would be great if we knew our entire audience was looking at one website to get its data, but we have an audience that’s so large and so fragmented that they go to this site and that site.

We’re working hard. We’ve seen the stories on the Internet; we’ve seen the stories in USA Today and on Kotaku. We know what people are saying. Through interviews like this and forum posts I’ve been making -- we’re trying to set better context as to why we make these decisions.

In the end, not everybody’s going to agree. I think the beauty of this is that it’s all 100 percent optional. We’re certainly not trying to nickel and dime people. We’re providing a full game experience for $60. The game is very feature-rich this year.