EA boss Frank Gibeau has said that his company will be “100% digital”.
Speaking to GI, Gibeau said “it’s in the near future. It’s coming,” when asked when he thought most – if not all – of his revenue would come from digital channels rather than the traditional retail disk-based channels.
“We have a clear line of sight on it and we’re excited about it,” he said. “Retail is a great channel for us. We have great relationships with our partners there. At the same time, the ultimate relationship is the connection that we have with the gamer.”
[drop2]”If the gamer wants to get the game through a digital download and that’s the best way for them to get it, that’s what we’re going to do. It has a lot of enhancements for our business. It allows us to keep more that we make. It allows us to do some really interesting things from a service level standpoint; we can be a lot more personalized with what we’re doing.”If the thought of a future of purely downloads and streaming puts you off, know that at least EA will still offer old school game buying methods.
“If customers want to buy a game at retail, they can do that too,” he added.
“For us, the fastest growing segment of our business is clearly digital and clearly digital services and ultimately Electronic Arts, at some point in the future we’re going to be a 100% digital company, period. It’s going to be there some day. It’s inevitable.”
Gibeau also confirms that he’ll be ready for streaming, whenever that is. Â “We’ll be prepared for it,” he said. “The next generation of hardware is going to come out.”
“It’s difficult to speculate what generation next would be after that, but there are opportunities in cloud and streaming that are very interesting to us and we have relationships with Gaikai and other companies where we’ve investigated a lot of that stuff and we clearly see our IP and our capabilities on the digital services front translating over very easily there.”
KeRaSh
I’m sure they like selling games through Origin. I personally don’t have a problem with digital copies of games. I just prefer Steam and that’s where I’ll be buying my PC games.
If they want to make any impact on PSN sales with full games, they better not charge full RRP or they’ll be in for a big surprise.
cc_star
FIFA at £54.99 sold pretty well I believe… and I’m sure they were happy with Mass Effect 2 or whichever one it was.
stormy
To be honest once everything goes digital only, that’s my que to hang up my gaming boots. If digital pricing is anything to go on its a total rip off. Prices in the digital domain seem to remain higher for longer. The end of cheaper games? I generally buy my games new when they have been out a while between 15-20 UK pounds on Blu Ray for the PS3. The only digital games I buy is stuff like shooter/journey. If I can no longer buy retail I guess I will give up gaming in this generation. EA can give all the glossy ‘closer to the gamer’ crap all they want. This is purely about getting maximum money, from minimum effort. I feel sorry for the retail chains too.
Taylor Made
Retail are to blame for this thought though, second hand is costing developers (at least they say) & they want find a way to kill them off like they nearly killed GAME/station
Forrest_01
As you say; “(at least they say)” – They will of course say that as they have to excuse trying to kill off the preowned market somehow. Funny how it was never a problem before this gen.
Put simply, they don’t like pre-owned because it takes away from their margin & they now have a way to combat this via the digital route (either via DLC, online passes or entirely downloadable games), which has only really come about in any tangible fashion this gen.
Retail & preowned aren’t killing the market & never have been, but with a lot of consoles now being connected to the net, they have just found a way that they can cut out what they perceive to be a loophole & maximise profits.
Do i understand why they are doing it? Of course i do, they are a business & will want to maximise any money made from their product. Do i like it? Not really, as they are removing choices that we currently have as consumers.
cc_star
Retail is costing developers?
Just publisher’s propaganda I’m afraid… I ONLY buy new games if I can subsidise the purchase with games I’m no longer playing, an enormous amount of people are the same.
The good thing about trading-in at a games retailer like GAME is that money goes towards another game, unlike whan a game is sold on eBay or Amazon Market where sellers are more likely to pocket the money or spend it on practically anything else.
With sales down 10% one year, 20% the following etc & etc as the industry outside of its pillar franchises seems to be in its death throws, I’d like to see it survive without people buying new games thanks to a trade-in subsidy.
blarty
Retail drops prices quicker to avail themselves of physical storage space…. stuff that isn’t selling is taking up space for new items that you can probably clear out of the stockroom quickly and remember that new games being unopened take up more room than their pre-owned counterparts – their boxes go straight out on the shelves rather than the ‘take me to the til’ boxes…
Digital distribution removes need to clear space quickly, so there’s no real rush to shift quickly and this less of an impetus to reduce in price
stormy
Also my metered internet service probably won’t cope which would mean more expense there. :(
fs
Gibeau speaks about the connection with the gamer. Is this connection/relationship (however you want to term it) really helped by all the premium packages and charging for basic online services that ea install into their games?
On the subject of cloud streaming in an idea world it would benefit gamers. The world is not ideal and internet is just not quick enough all over the world for all gamers to be able to use this. It’s good that EA are going to continue to sell games on disk, i’m not comfortable with moving away from this tradition yet. I could probably benefit from cloud streaming, but where i’m from the internet is very unreliable. One day you’ll be flying the next you’ll be crawling. If EA truly want to be 100% digital they’ll have to wait a while.
psychobudgie
Won’t happen for some time. There is no way EA would give up on Retail unless their Retail sales figures fell off a cliff and their digital download sales climbed back up. As neither is likely I am not concerned.
Taylor Made
I personally welcome digital only, after having the vita since launch. Changing games to play another as never been as easy as a touch. No getting up to find the darn disc.
Unless the next gen can go all megatron & transform to change my disc without me getting up I would be happy
KeRaSh
I’ve noticed the same thing with my Vita. It’s really nice to have all games on a single card and I think digital download prices are pretty fair, even more so with all the discounts.
OnlineAssassin77
I like a bit of digital download my self.(might be the reason ive been putting on weight) ;D
hazelam
you know what, i believe him.
there’s absolutely no preowned games with downloads.
and we all know ea would love nothing better than to wipe out the preowned market.
they’re not thinking about what the customer wants though, that’s not the last thing they think about, but it is pretty low on their list of concerns.
and streaming would be great for them, then they can stop supporting the games when they want and make sure nobody can play them at all, even single player.
they can stop you playing multiplayer now when they shut the servers off, after a couple of years, but they can’t stop single player, or local multiplayer.
with a streaming service, they could.
Youles
He does look a bit like Harry Potter.
Kennykazey
It’s true! That’s the first thing I noticed about this article. :-D
Ed the Penguin
Exactly what I was thinking!
OnlineAssassin77
Lol I saw the pic and thought is that harry potter he’s aged quite a bit. :D
Forrest_01
Clearly his battles with Voldemort have taken their toll.
Nice that he was able to get plastic surgery to remove his scar though. That’s no NHS job either!
BalramRules
I didn’t notice until you said it, and I couldn’t stop laughing, aha!
(You don’t get 7+ likes for nothing) ;)
justboy
I completely agree that games will soon be all digital. The only issue is download speeds, it takes me days to get anything downloaded that bigger than 5gb.
Once it becomes as fast as popping down to a shop then I would be all for it.
The Lone Steven
The day that gaming goes digital only is the day i quit console gaming and focus on PC gaming due to it being easier and quicker to download stuff on a PC. Plus, knowing EA, they will price the games at £60+ with day -1 DLC which basically completes the game for you. I remeber DA:A being £32 on the PS store for a few years.
Plus i don’t trust EA with streaming games as i can see them taking a game off in order to force you to get the newest one regardless if it’s a sequel or not. :S
Why can’t EA understand that the preowned market supports the gaming market as many people do trade in games in order to get the new one? For example, Fifa 11 was traded in by many people in order to get Fifa 12.
Forrest_01
As a better example, yesterday i traded FEAR 2, Bulletstorm, Heavy Rain & Lego Harry Potter (5-7) so that i could pick up two new titles i wanted – Spiderman & Lego Batman.
Could i have afforded both without doing trade ins to make a dent in the price? Not in the slightest.
I just kinda wish they would wake up to this fact, as i know for definite that i am not the only one that operates in this way.