Digital sales to overtake retail claims Electronic Arts COO – Video Games Update
The giant publisher and developer Electronic Arts (EA) has stated that its digital distribution service Origin is doing quite well and the company believes that revenues from the service will soon overtake those from retail.
The company believes that the video games market is slowly shifting towards digital distribution and also mentioned the growing demand for social and mobile games. “There will come a point, whether it is two or three years from now, when we say. 'We are
doing more in digital media now than we are in physical media,' and it's clearly ... not far away," stated Peter Moore who is the Chief Operating Officer at the company.
"This fiscal year we have 41 social mobile and free-to-play games on the slate, and later in the year we might make announcements about more games coming," continued Moore explaining that EA sees the potential of Social Gaming and is jumping in full force
to capitalise on it.
The shifting trends might be a cause of concern for the core gamer as developers and publishers have realised that there is a bigger market in the social gaming space when compared to core gaming. The main advantage of social gaming is that developers can
expect to reap the same rewards as core gaming but will much lower development costs. There is also more fall back room when the intellectual property (IP) is not successful.
Another popular argument that developers use when they try to justify the move to digital distribution is that downloadable games would be cheaper when compared to retail ones. The main reason behind this is that publishers will be able to save on disc manufacturing
and distribution costs which will allow them to offer the title to the public at a lower price since its download only.
This theory however has proven to be false so far as the prices of digital download only games are pretty much the same as their retail counterparts. This leads to the conclusion that the only reason why developers and publishers are pushing towards digital
distribution is to combat p****y and used games sales.
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