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EA Sports VP: Subscription Based Gaming Coming?

12:27 PM - July 26, 2011 by RaychelSnr

After we've heard rumors and rumors of rumors about EA Sports contemplating a subscription cloud based service for it's games, we get a senior exec saying the same things in an interview, basically making all we've heard to be true.

Quote:


	"If we look at what consumers have pushed other industries for: if we look at what consumers forced the music industry to provide, if we look at what consumers have driven as a result of television and movie subscription, if you look at us - there's absolutely a time somewhere at some point in the future where the consumers say, 'Hey, this is how we want to interact with you: we want to give you a monthly or annual subscription and we want access to everything you make,'" Wilson told us. "They get to drive the time and place for it, and a lot of it is technology dependent, but absolutely we can see a future where that might be the way we deliver games."

What does it mean? Well as I've pointed out each week on the OS Radio Show (we even talked about this specific article on there last night), this is the likely future of gaming. It makes too much sense from a cost/development cycle perspective not to do.

For the customer, I'd expect this might be something coming in the next generation of consoles (2014-2015). Depending on how stupid console manufacturers are, we could see physical media completely go away and the cloud take over gaming by then. Of course, with SD Card Memory Prices falling so rapidly maybe it's got a future in gaming as a media? 8 GB Cards currently go for just over 10 bucks, and the actual cost of manufacturing them can't be much higher than a Blu-Ray disk these days.

The way I envision it is that each publisher would offer monthly or annual subscriptions to games. Basically you'd pay $60 for access to a game for a year -- and then I can see a publisher basically bringing in annual packages for their entire lineup at a cost savings. So it'd be $40/month for every EA Sports Title through the whole year.

This could indicate that you could see development cycles which are never finished per-se, as games are continually updated and added to throughout the year. Regardless, it's an interesting conversation which is all heresay up until the point the future of gaming is revealed in the new Sony and Microsoft offerings, likely next June (or the one after that) at E3.

Member Comments

# 21 JJT @ 08/03/11 06:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DaveDQ


	I don't understand the clinging to hard copies of the game. Digital copies remove clutter, are easily accessible and last longer. My concern is that they will charge extra based on the process's efficiency. I can see EA touting it as innovative, so we have to pay a little extra for it.

A hard copy I can take to the store and trade in to take some $ off the next title I buy. Can't do that with digital.

# 22 spit_bubble @ 08/08/11 03:47 PM

They need to make it a better deal than the disc version if it's going to succeed. There has to be some attraction to it, and probably the best way to attract customers at this point is with lower prices. I don't really see it working well any other way.

# 23 13whitebread @ 08/18/11 03:03 PM

This would then drive the competitive market once again for instance. Xbox 360 you have to pay for their online mode for a gold account on a PS3 you don't have to pay anything. I guess there will always be someone who is for the consumer and to pay them enough money instead of like EA sports who wants to make all the money. 2K sports for instance made there football game equal to the madden version arguably. They reduced there price to 20.00 dollars. That forced EA to spend more money to lock up the licensing rights. But on the consumer side it will come a day when our wallets speak for themselves. Video games are not for the Rich only.

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EA Sports VP: Subscription Based Gaming Coming?