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Peter Moore - Next-gen transition to lose a few publishers, discs to eventually disappear
A portion of an IndustryGamers interview with EA's Peter Moore...
IG: EA's been pushing digital very heavily while other publishers seem slower to adapt. Do you think the industry is due for another consolidation with a publisher or two dying out or getting acquired?
PM: I guess yes, but I think we always see that with every transition. Publishers either make it through or they don't – transitions are hard because revenue slows down and costs speed up. You're getting ready to develop for new platforms, whether they be hardware platforms or software, and it's getting to be even more complex now. The companies that have prepared themselves and have diversified their offerings to chase the consumer wherever they want to play games are the companies that will succeed and thrive and flourish. Companies that continue to rely on the old model as the model changes before our eyes, unless they change their ways and invest in the future those companies eventually will die off. No two ways about it.
The packaged goods business, while still flourishing and strong, eventually – as we've seen in music and movies – will go to the cloud. It will go digital and we'll be delivering games from the cloud and delivering games directly to hard drives and we're still going to sell a lot of discs for the foreseeable future. But eventually, physical media will diminish as the core part of how gamers get their content. And we're ready for that, but we're also still ready to be the number one packaged goods publisher in the world, which we are. It's about this concept, which I always use in my presentations, called “creative destruction.” As soon as a business model is formed, companies start figuring out how to bring it down and then change the model to advantage themselves. And we're going through a period of creative destruction in the interactive entertainment industry right now that we haven't seen in the 30-35 year history of our industry. If you want to be a publisher that's still going to be viable for the consumer 3-4 years from now, you better be ready to deliver your content anytime, anywhere and to everyone.
Full interview here
IG: EA's been pushing digital very heavily while other publishers seem slower to adapt. Do you think the industry is due for another consolidation with a publisher or two dying out or getting acquired?
PM: I guess yes, but I think we always see that with every transition. Publishers either make it through or they don't – transitions are hard because revenue slows down and costs speed up. You're getting ready to develop for new platforms, whether they be hardware platforms or software, and it's getting to be even more complex now. The companies that have prepared themselves and have diversified their offerings to chase the consumer wherever they want to play games are the companies that will succeed and thrive and flourish. Companies that continue to rely on the old model as the model changes before our eyes, unless they change their ways and invest in the future those companies eventually will die off. No two ways about it.
The packaged goods business, while still flourishing and strong, eventually – as we've seen in music and movies – will go to the cloud. It will go digital and we'll be delivering games from the cloud and delivering games directly to hard drives and we're still going to sell a lot of discs for the foreseeable future. But eventually, physical media will diminish as the core part of how gamers get their content. And we're ready for that, but we're also still ready to be the number one packaged goods publisher in the world, which we are. It's about this concept, which I always use in my presentations, called “creative destruction.” As soon as a business model is formed, companies start figuring out how to bring it down and then change the model to advantage themselves. And we're going through a period of creative destruction in the interactive entertainment industry right now that we haven't seen in the 30-35 year history of our industry. If you want to be a publisher that's still going to be viable for the consumer 3-4 years from now, you better be ready to deliver your content anytime, anywhere and to everyone.