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EA on F2P, used games, Wii rise/fall, EA Wii U games not going digital at first
The following comes from EA's Peter Moore...
On taking their big-name games and going free-to-play...
Ultimately, we’ll get there. There’s no doubt. But I think depending on what happens in the next generation, it could well be that there are more and more growing free experiences coming from below, if you will, creeping toward the higher-end client, rather than the higher-end client creeping toward free.
On used games...
Used games were a bigger issue for the industry — I wasn’t resigned to it, but I recognized that it was the right of gamers and the right of our retailer. To be very fair, GameStop has always been very public about the fact that [they] keep the ecosystem moving with revenue that comes in, and it’s not like they go and take their game credit and go to McDonald’s and buy burgers. They re-up into new games. Our job is to take that consumer and say, you’ve got a used game consumer and embrace that guy rather than shun him and say “no, not a penny of what we spent on this we get from you.” It’s kept GameStop to be a thriving retailer unlike a lot of bricks and mortar. They’ve got 6,600 doors. I’m not sure they’re there without having a real digital strategy and a used games strategy.
On Wii's rise and fall...
I think that the Wii was so revolutionary that it took the market by surprise…. That thing just exploded because it was a brand new way of playing videogames, completely new. The Wii U feels more evolutionary, the idea of this SmartGlass thing that Microsoft talked about was attractive and I think it will do good numbers. But if you’re saying, will it sell in the first 36 months what the Wii did, I think that might be a challenge because the Wii just exploded. Sometimes you like that, sometimes you actually don’t. You want to build a steady community that is sticky and stays with you, and doesn’t treat the Wii as we’re now seeing — there’s a lot of Wiis in the world, most of which sit on a shelf somewhere. You know. And so it was like a meteor that roared across the sky and disappeared. And you look at the industry numbers on it now, year on year the Wii has just dropped, and clearly we don’t make any games for it anymore. It just has not given the level of engagement that you need to have with a console. And that becomes the key. Selling games that are ostensibly offline was fun for a while, but then the connected engagement that we look for and the industry looks for, we couldn’t deliver.
On EA's Wii U retail games not going digital at first...
The first one is disc, and we’ll be discs for the three games we’re doing, and we’ll watch very closely how the consumer adopts digital there.
Full interview here
On taking their big-name games and going free-to-play...
Ultimately, we’ll get there. There’s no doubt. But I think depending on what happens in the next generation, it could well be that there are more and more growing free experiences coming from below, if you will, creeping toward the higher-end client, rather than the higher-end client creeping toward free.
On used games...
Used games were a bigger issue for the industry — I wasn’t resigned to it, but I recognized that it was the right of gamers and the right of our retailer. To be very fair, GameStop has always been very public about the fact that [they] keep the ecosystem moving with revenue that comes in, and it’s not like they go and take their game credit and go to McDonald’s and buy burgers. They re-up into new games. Our job is to take that consumer and say, you’ve got a used game consumer and embrace that guy rather than shun him and say “no, not a penny of what we spent on this we get from you.” It’s kept GameStop to be a thriving retailer unlike a lot of bricks and mortar. They’ve got 6,600 doors. I’m not sure they’re there without having a real digital strategy and a used games strategy.
On Wii's rise and fall...
I think that the Wii was so revolutionary that it took the market by surprise…. That thing just exploded because it was a brand new way of playing videogames, completely new. The Wii U feels more evolutionary, the idea of this SmartGlass thing that Microsoft talked about was attractive and I think it will do good numbers. But if you’re saying, will it sell in the first 36 months what the Wii did, I think that might be a challenge because the Wii just exploded. Sometimes you like that, sometimes you actually don’t. You want to build a steady community that is sticky and stays with you, and doesn’t treat the Wii as we’re now seeing — there’s a lot of Wiis in the world, most of which sit on a shelf somewhere. You know. And so it was like a meteor that roared across the sky and disappeared. And you look at the industry numbers on it now, year on year the Wii has just dropped, and clearly we don’t make any games for it anymore. It just has not given the level of engagement that you need to have with a console. And that becomes the key. Selling games that are ostensibly offline was fun for a while, but then the connected engagement that we look for and the industry looks for, we couldn’t deliver.
On EA's Wii U retail games not going digital at first...
The first one is disc, and we’ll be discs for the three games we’re doing, and we’ll watch very closely how the consumer adopts digital there.