EA's COO Speaks At DICE Summit, Offers Industry Advice

[Atrayo]

Hi All,

I caught another EA article off of the "Games Beat" news site. Where the EA COO Mr. John Shappert goes into the finer details of how to avoid the games industry distress. The venue was at the yearly DICE Summit for the games industry, which ends today in Las Vegas. (DICE stands for: Design Innovate Communicate Entertain)

Here's the link to the Games Beat Article dated today Feb. 19th.

EA was cutting lots of jobs, shelving game projects, and closing offices even as other companies were growing fast in new parts of the game business. These days, if you don’t have a game in the top 20 titles — which in the U.S. account for 50 percent of console game revenue — you are not making money. And EA had too few titles in the top 20 in the past year.

The rest of the core video game industry had a tough year in 2009, with 11,488 layoffs among 95 companies during the year, according to M2 Research. But EA created a “WTF moment” in the industry when it announced last fall in the same day that it was cutting 1,500 jobs and had purchased social game company Playfish for $300 million plus earnouts.

Some of the guidance that EA COO Mr. John Schappert to the DICE Summit attendees echoes the EA overall strategy to date. Meaning consumers may be buying less games, but are playing them longer.


Tip #3 is the most telling of their future intents:

Tip No. 3: Invest in the future. Get online. Consider the fresh revenue streams such as online subscriptions, premium downloadable content, free-to-play games with micro-transactions, and in-game sponsorships and ads. Much of this action is coming to fruition on the connected game consoles, where companies now have to support their titles with six months worth of online extensions.

There's already talk that EA / DICE (the Swedish Game developer) will be having VIP codes for downloadable content for "Bad Company 2". Whereas any second hand users will have to pay up for those codes to get the same content. Smells like a micro-transaction to me for 2nd hand premium codes. (I wonder if a secondary market will ever be formed around such exclusive key codes?)

[JON2010spb]

Nice ma

[Ned]

I don't like the idea of online games that have a micro-transaction setup as it could divaricate that particular game's community. Some wouldn't have certain maps so couldn't enter some game servers etc.

[Snott]

Exactly, so it indirectly forces you to part with your money for the content anyway. They ain't stupid