During an recent interview with Kotaku, EA's COO, Peter Moore, believes the future of gaming involves all games having paid microtransactions and subscriptions with a significant amount of future games being in the free-to-play model.
The goal would be to find the best and quickest way to generate larger amounts of revenue from a huge userbase in the millions and "billions" than just targeting a smaller "hardcore" userbase.
He feels the $60 model for games favored by "hardcore" gamers will struggle a lot in the future in terms of sales and growth potential. It would only get worse once the industry actually starts to shift in favor of a new revenue model.
Quote:
|
"I think, ultimately, those microtransactions will be in every game, but the game itself or the access to the game will be free. Ultimately, my goal is... I measure our business in millions of people have bought our game. Maybe when I'm retired, as this industry progresses, hundreds of millions are playing the games. Zero bought it. Hundreds of millions are playing. We're getting 5 cents, 6 cents ARPU [average revenue per user] a day out of these people. The great majority will never pay us a penny which is perfectly fine with us, but they add to the eco-system and the people who do pay money葉he whales as they are affectionately referred to葉o use a Las Vegas term, love it because to be number one of a game that like 55 million people playing is a big deal."
|
Quote:
|
"That's the point. If the business model... what do you do? It may well be that there will be games that survive and they are the $60 games, but I believe that the real growth is bringing billions of people into the industry and calling them gamers. Hardcore gamers won't like to hear this. They like to circle the wagons around what they believe is something they feel they have helped build預nd rightly so. But we have seen, whether it was with the Wii getting mom off the couch to do Wii Sports or whether it was, more recently EA Sports Active, where we get females who love to work out, all the things that social gaming did由ock Band did it, Guitar Hero did it預ll of the things that elevated it from being a dark art of teenage boys usually sequestered in the bedroom葉hat it was testosterone-filled content that everybody railed against葉o where everybody is a gamer...if you can move your index finger and swipe it this way, your'e a gamer. And that has got to be the way it goes."
|
http://kotaku.com/5919847/the-strang...ing-to-a-giant
___________________________________________________________
Daily Recap:
1) A new patch for the digital title of Fez ends up causing save files to become corrupt with no real solution possible until another patch is released in the future by Polytron studio.
http://www.giantbomb.com/news/maybe-...ez-patch/4232/
2) Rumors of Sony planning to buy Gaikai ended up falling apart recently after Gaikai placed the buyout price at $500 million.
http://www.destructoid.com/gaikai-is...n-229968.phtml
3) Current PS3 exclusive HD remake of Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath could end up having an Xbox 360 version in the future with Microsoft slowly regaining some interest in having the title appear on XBLA.
http://www.destructoid.com/360-versi...n-229974.phtml