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.”
dave87fez
Doesn’t matter to me whether I get digital or physical media…but if it says EA on it, you won’t find me anywhere near it!
Izorpo
have to agree he does look a lot like Harry Potter (so was Voldemort the used err pre-owned game buyer?
To be honest I don’t like EA, I didn’t like signing in to EA servers to play Dragons Age or Mass Effect 2 or 3 single player and sitting waiting for their crappy servers to realize I was signing in – on both xbox and ps3 this happened which meant on xbox I was denied playing a single player game as the server wouldn’t connect with Dragons Age. (I bought it new as well)
EA mostly produces shovel ware for the fois gras gamer
TSBonyman
W
TSBonyman
We need a full and proper refund system in place if digital downloads are ever going to take the place of retail.
dave87fez
Definitely!
gazzagb
Depends on a time scale, but if EA could get their way they would be 100% digital. Force everything through Origin on PC and PSN/XBL for consoles, therefore destroying the pre-owned market.
Bladesteel
How can the boss of _Electronic_ arts not know the difference between analog and digital?
RudeAwakening
If the digital game is cheaper than the retail then i wont have a problem with it, actually i will have a problem, i forgot ill have to invest in a bigger hard drive.