EA, Touting 'Profound Impact' of Streaming and Subscription, Announces Origin Access Premier (gamesindustry.biz)

EA CEO Andrew Wilson announced that the game publisher is making a big move into cloud gaming. The company is also planning to launch a new version of its Origin Access subscription service on PC called Origin Access Premiere that will introduce games like Madden, FIFA, and more the same day they launch at retail. From a report: During the publisher's E3 2018 press conference, CEO Andrew Wilson descried the combination of streaming and subscription as "the greatest disruption" to the world of entertainment of the past five years. He pointed to how this business model for movies, TV and books has changed those markets, and believes this combination will have "a profound impact" on the games industry in the years to come. Wilson's comments echoed those of his CFO Blake Jorgensen, who said back in November that a combination of live services, such as FIFA Ultimate Team, and subscriptions will lead to "uncapped" monetisation of its players over the longest possible period of time.

In its latest financials, EA revealed that 40% of its revenue last year came from live services, while full game downloads and physical game sales are dropping. Wilson reminded conference attendees of the publisher's recent acquisition of GameFly's Israel-based cloud gaming team, predicting a future where players can enjoy high-end games on any device anywhere with an internet connection. While there are tech demos for EA's streaming service out there, Wilson stressed that it's "not quite ready for full market primetime," but pitched it as a "promise of what we hope to bring you in the future." In the meantime, Electronic Arts took the opportunity to announce a new subscription system that shows the publisher continuing to push towards a service-based economy for video games. Origin Access Premier is a new addition to the firm's PC-based games service: a premium subscription that gives players access to even more titles.

Comments

Yeah, nope

[admin7087]

Latency, kids lack money, and gamers hate EA anyway. It's not gonna happen, at least not with EA at the forefront. Maybe Valve can do it, but not EA.

Re:Yeah, nope

[Darinbob]

EA is the McDonald's of gaming. Lots of customers who don't expect anything notable. So they'll make a ton of money while being roundly panned by critics.

Re:Yeah, nope

[JustNiz]

> Find a lower quality fast food chain to compare EA with.

I don't think one exists.

Re:Yeah, nope

[corezz]

Kids will always have money. When you watch Twitch you see an endless stream of teens and tweens forking out money to videogame streamers who are neither doing anything in their stream, nor acknowledging the free cash they go from this anonymous kid. And this kid is happy about it. These streamers are multi-millionaires from all this endless free cash from these kids.

The hate for EA, like history has shown with human behavior, is that people will forget when they see the next announcement trailer for the next anticipated game. They were upset by the Star Wars debacle, but trust me, history shows, they forget quiet easily.

Re: Yeah, nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Sega Channel had no latency game streaming in the 90's.

They did it by streaming you the whole ROM until you had the whole thing and then just play it like you own it.

Of course the only online games were only available in Japan.

Re:Yeah, nope

[mjwx]

Latency, kids lack money, and gamers hate EA anyway. It's not gonna happen, at least not with EA at the forefront. Maybe Valve can do it, but not EA.

Yes, but as long as the latest Call of Repetition: Modern Snorefare, Battlefied: Pay to Win and Washed Up Sportsman 18 keeps selling, they'll stay in business.

EA hasn't been in the business of making quality games for well over a decade. The people who pay £60 a year for FIFA wont care about latency... Hell I've played FIFA 17 on a PS4, it was already laggy as hell and loaded so slowly they had to have a minigame to prevent the players from finding something else to do. The shift to streaming wont be that hard for these games.

Gamers forgot EA a long time ago.

Re:Yeah, nope

[Cederic]

Ooh, excellent - but tell me, why haven't they already contacted me about hosting the servers in my house?

Just that.. the moment they host them anywhere else, there'll be latency. Shit, I run my own streaming service and get latency from the next room.

Anyone else remember

[rsilvergun]

When Activision's CEO was pissed because gamers played thousands of hours of Call of Duty and only paid $60 bucks for the privilege. IIRC he stopped just short of calling them thieves. This is like that, only nicer. CEOs are angry they're not getting $60/mo from us to play games.

Re:Anyone else remember

[Anonymous Coward]

Video game companies are the equivalent of casinos. This isn't decades ago with the plucky company making a fun to play game for fun. A great deal of effort goes into making the grind, lengthening the grind, and monetizing the grind. Video games are the new slot machine.

Re:Anyone else remember

[Darinbob]

They're also extremely expensive to make. Customers demand the best graphics, full voice acting, more features than the previous games, and so forth. So with all that expense they feel that they must have a blockbuster hit in order to pay for it all (well, after saving money by working underpaid devs and artists to death). And like movie blockbusters, the plan is to never innovate or do anything different that might cause a drop in sales.

So you can try to look at indie games to make up the difference. But they're in a bind too - too many devs are doing simplistic stuff (non-coders throwing stuff together with an existing engine) and are still desperate to monetize just to cover the cost of not having a paying job for the last two years. So you get preview versions you have to pay for just to keep the hype up a year before the game is scheduled to be done, and so forth.

It's a weird industry. Meanwhile, we can still play Fallout 3 forever...

Re:Anyone else remember

[boojumbadger]

Jees, I've been gaming since Adam (Coleco) and I turn off advanced graphics, music, voice acting, and interstitials as much as possible. I'm not sure where you are getting your data, from rich kids, I guess. The problem with the industry is they think those things are more important than gameplay and reliability.

Re:Anyone else remember

[Anonymous Coward]

All of that is caused by the ridiculous IP BS that their parent industry pushed on the world.

The cost of an engine is so high because there isn't really a good competitor to the proprietary engines. Most of the OSS engines were themselves proprietary prior to being open sourced and very few publishers are willing to allow a DRM-free release to be made for a new game. Which would be required if the engine used had an open source license on it, as the whole fucking point of DRM is to hide and obfuscate the DRM checks, which OSS licenses do not allow.

Given that cost the choice is to either pay up or roll your own. The latter is where we get more innovative gameplay but that too tends to result in yet another proprietary engine that chances are will only be used for a few games if that, then fade into obscurity. It's an investment that most won't make, as it has a low ROI assuming it's positive in the first place, and it's something that you have to keep updated to work on all of your target platforms. Which increases the risk, because hackers love getting user-land code execution from buggy untested / proven engines, and platform owners hate it. Which can be another barrier to entry. Finally there's the issue of software patents, which if you want to release your game in one of the biggest markets on earth for gaming, you'd best be in compliance with. Far easier to just license the engine from someone else and let them deal with the legal issues than put up with them yourself. That's true regardless of your company's size.

As far as the indie devs themselves, the industry can't support them with their current "Mine!" mentality. Indeed, most of them are being supported by donations from fans of their collective past games, or just good will based on the given concept. Further scams run real risks on all of them because of their funding source, in addition to clueless individuals who think that a AAA game's development is a point and click job that costs nothing, that content cutting isn't a regular thing during development, and that insulting and demoralizing the developers is the best way to get the game released faster.

Yes there are a lot of non-coders in indie development, but that's to be expected. Most companies don't produce their own engine, they buy them from another company. That's why a lot of games of the same genre seem to be fancy paint jobs with one or two different gimmicks lately. It's a safe investment for the company making the game and a cost / time saver. As a result, very few people within a game company are actual programmers, most would be script kiddies with maybe a few exceptions thrown in for that one time the game had to work on a given platform and they were desperate. So no, you can't expect a lot of indie dev teams to suddenly pull a brand new game engine out of their ass. They just don't have that kind of skill. Creating a script that calls shoot_enemy(), is a lot easier than actually writing the physics algorithm to determine whether or not an object was hit after calling shoot_enemy(). It requires a completely different skillset and way of thinking.

The reason we can still play the old games is because the publisher has been nice and released the game DRM-free, or because someone reverse engineered the game engine and OSSed it, or because the hardware and game data is still around in some usable form, emulation or not. The latter two options being considered the equivalent of piracy by some publishers. What the TFA and the one from yesterday are peddling is the idea that games should be rented, A.K.A streamed, from publishers so they can make even more money and never have to expose the game engines to the public. That would effectively usher back in the era of the "Disney Vault" model that digital media form

Re:Anyone else remember

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Well if you're still happy with Coleco level graphics, I guess those are valid things to turn off. I like a good game that's also amazing looking. Like Witcher 3.

Re:Anyone else remember

[Anonymous Coward]

They're also extremely expensive to make. Customers demand the best graphics, full voice acting, more features than the previous games, and so forth. So with all that expense they feel that they must have a blockbuster hit in order to pay for it all (well, after saving money by working underpaid devs and artists to death).

Even modest, niche indie games sell hundreds of thousands of copies today. 20 years ago a quarter million sales was a blockbuster. And now with no more need for physical media, physical ad campaigns, physical logistics, making your own engine from scratch, better dev and art tools, and many going with self-publishing, the overhead costs consuming revenue have been significantly reduced.

Some types of games cost more to make today. All types of games sell more copies today. Many games make orders of magnitude more profit today than they would have in any other timeframe.

Hell, small games were once shareware and devs would hope to get a fiver a day. Now a single person can promise a game, get paid in advance, release it in early access, and coast along for years.

Re:Anyone else remember

[boojumbadger]

I'm just saying that the cause of game bloat is not in essential game mechanics.

Re:Anyone else remember

[nehumanuscrede]

" Customers demand the best graphics, full voice acting, more features than the previous games, and so forth. "

I think I would just settle for a fully finished, properly beta tested, bug-free experience without half the game being locked behind day one DLC.

Re:Anyone else remember

[tlhIngan]

Customers demand the best graphics, full voice acting, more features than the previous games, and so forth.

No they don't. It's very clear that Nintendo systems do not have the power to do any of this, Even the latest Nintendo system (Switch) is a higher end mobile system, processing power wise.

What people want is fun. For a lot of people playing multiplayer FPS, fun comes in the form of well-balanced maps, weapons and scenarios, as well as careful network monitoring keeping cheaters at bay. For others, it's a cheery platformer.

Problem is, "fun" is hard. Making a well-balanced map is extremely difficult. Ensuring weapons aren't overpowered even more so. And monitoring, detection and banning of cheaters is even more difficult.

By comparison, it's easy to make graphics more detailed, hire celebrity talent, etc. It's a very measurable improvement over all the other things. I mean, you can't really sell more balanced maps, fair weapons, or even your anti-cheat system.

I suppose it's why I've been pulling away from video games of late - I used to buy tons of games every year. I have all the consoles, but I find I'm buying very little for them, except maybe the Switch. I do buy games on Steam for PC, but generally speaking I have such a huge backlog from my game buying days I don't usually buy a game unless it's under $10 (on sale). If it means waiting a year or so, so be it - very very very few game franchises out there mandate an immediate play.

That, and all the free games Xbox Live Gold gives me, plus the lower quality free games PS Plus gives me (the quality of PS+ games has gone down significantly compared to the PS3 era) means really, there is always a "new" game for me to try.

It's incredible, since most of my "videogaming" money now goes into board games, and half the fun is provided by other people - and not directly by playing the game itself. Heck, sometimes I'm excluded because of the player limit and I can still enjoy myself watching people play and comment on the games.

Guess I gotta go chase everyone off my lawn now.

Re:Anyone else remember

[Cederic]

Your entire post is predicated on a very flawed assumption.

The cost of an engine is so high

You can download and use Unity for free, or pay $1500/year for a full licence. You can use the Unreal engine for free, earn $12k/year (per game) with no royalties then pay 5% on top of that. You can use the CryEngine for free, earn $5k/year royalty free then pay 5% on top of that. You can buy RPGMaker for $130 and pay no royalties on a game that sells over a million copies.

The cost of an engine is not high.

Re: Anyone else remember

[Maxoverdrive]

Godot engine

The complete theft...

[blahplusplus]

... of videogame software is almost complete, due to mass stupidity and technological illiteracy of the average gamer.

Re:The complete theft...

[Cederic]

Yeah. If only there were somewhere you could buy a tremendous range of AAA, indie and other games at sensible prices.

Somewhere like itch.io, gog.com, Steam or humblebundle.com

Oh. Hang on.

Re:The complete theft...

[blahplusplus]

Yeah. If only there were somewhere you could buy a tremendous range of AAA, indie and other games at sensible prices.

Somewhere like itch.io, gog.com, Steam or humblebundle.com

Oh. Hang on.

No one cares about most indie shovelware. For most of gog.com's history they were a dumping ground for bad indie games and still are. Whoever is running gog is not serious about AAA. If I were gog I would be buying up old IP's like supreme commander, descent, freespace, etc and fully funding new AAA games. Most drm free games and indie games, let's be honest are low quality shovelware. Even the AA games coming out of kickstarter are little more than retreads of past games. Many developers from fan funded games have learned nothing in 20 years, the combat of infinity engine games are still shit and they are viewing bioware 2D rpg's through rose colored glasses. I enjoyed the original Pillars of eternity but it wasn't anything groundbreaking, it was a very average game and I knew the sequel would be underwhelming due to the first one being very underwhelming itself.

The combat system was slightly improved, but the dungeon crawling and combat in those games needs serious work. I love dungeon crawling and finding loot and those oldschool bioware games have the absolute worst combat and even their designers admit it. I would take legend of grimrock (the first), lands of lore 1 or arcana for the SNES over any bioware infinity engine crap anyday. There needs to be actual goals and objects in the game world that have interesting mathematical characteristics. We are talking video GAMES here, the world doesn't have to be a simulation of our world or try to ape books/tv and movies. Games should be raw imagination they don't have to be real.

Planescape/infinity engine developers talk about the shitty combat:

https://www.eurogamer.net/arti...

Foul Necromancy.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a fan of the Ultima series, seeing the name Origin touted out like this... Origin was the name of the original company that made the Ultima games, which was sold to EA, after the game EA had a huge plot point involving the shapes of the EA logo being a sign of overwhelming oppression.

Every company EA takes over seems to be pulled into doing basically the opposite of what they wanted to do for their customers before, before they are slowly crushed in ignominy.

Seeing the name of Origin used for this online system is pretty nasty in association.

Origin the online service was pushed into prominence almost entirely because EA was unable to get away with charging in-game fees for DLC, instead of letting Steam take a cut of the sales.

They're a single-studio ecosystem - and while not the worst of those - them using Origin as the name of that service really strikes me the wrong way every time I see it.

Latency, latency, latency.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cloud computing might be fine for games like Checkers or a turn based RPG, but not for anything real time, like racing sims.

Re:Latency, latency, latency.

[corezz]

You make it sound like that is going to stay that way for the rest of time. Ten years ago the average internet speed was 3Mbps today its over 20Mbps. Latency has also dropped in tandem.

Re: Latency, latency, latency.

[Anonymous Coward]

Latency is based on the speed of light, so yeah, pretty much till the end of time, or until we can figure out how to communicate through neutrinos which will mean we can send the signal through earth instead of around. Even then.

Re:Latency, latency, latency.

[Agripa]

You make it sound like that is going to stay that way for the rest of time. Ten years ago the average internet speed was 3Mbps today its over 20Mbps. Latency has also dropped in tandem.

If anything, latency has gotten worse. Some of this is due to higher speed encoding using interleaving for better burst error correction. ISPs consider this a big win because it allows much higher line speeds even if it comes at the expense of longer latency. Some of it just comes from poor network management with things like buffer bloat, ISP run transparent proxies, and ISP tunneling.

The first DSL I had was 768/768 SDSL and that was the high point and a huge latency improvement over dial up or anything I have had since. The various forms of ADSL and cable have almost an order of magnitude more latency and they have gotten worse over time instead of better.

They want to make your PC a console.

[waspleg]

Microsoft is helping. I do not have uplay or origins accounts. I've had a steam account for over 14 years and refuse to use a different platform mostly out of convenience but don't use it for online games.

It is very clear they want that MMO money. I'm sure they're really shitty that Sony and Microsoft already have their own captive portals.

Re:They want to make your PC a console.

[Cederic]

Thing is, if you're buying two new full price EA games a year then £90/year subscription for access to their whole catalogue is a decent deal.

If it was available on Steam and not Origin then I might be tempted.

The microtransactions would be the thing holding me back. I hate games being crippled to encourage microtransaction income.

Not buying another EA Game

[c horde]

I won't ever buy another EA game. BF1 was terrible, Battle Front 1 & 2 are terrible and they over charged for those terrible games. EA has turned to political correctness and the idealism of globalism. So long EA.

Re:Not buying another EA Game

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/by_genre/developerId,120214/

Send your money to Gordon Fong, the progranner of Archos.

Looks like he's doing pretty well and remained in the games industry.

Re:Not buying another EA Game

[Anonymous Coward]

The irony is that when I was young, and EA was amazing

And not just Archon. EA had or at least published an asston of really good games, for a while. F/A-18 interceptor. Marble Madness. Populous. Pinball Construction Set. Sim City. Skate or Die. Black Crypt. 688 Attack Sub. Seven Cities of Gold! Plenty more where those came from.

They used to sell good games.

Dunno when they lost their way, but they did. I have no idea why anybody buys their shit any more. They went from a company catering to gamers, to a VERY anti-gamer company. For some reason, people keep shoveling money into their open maw.

I am glad

[DontBeAMoran]

I am really glad I don't want to play any EA game, thus avoiding the need to install any of their software on my computer.

It's a service not targeting Average Jo PC gamer

[Anonymous Coward]

If people are steadily moving to mobile instead of console or PC gaming, then the average company can expect a slow decline in profits unless they make the games cheaper (more numbers by luring in poorer folks for less), more expensive (count on PC "whales" for profit with DLC on everything, probably the usual EA plan) or make them move to a mobile version of the same game with a combination of all of those icky tricks plus demanding root access on your smartphone.

I don't know how streaming gaming can work in the states unless there's a shitload of "whales" in cities making up for the lack of broadband speed and service stability in areas that aren't metropolitan. Maybe the cities are all people need? Well, less likely for the infrastructure to be a stinking turd heap, but with the way ISPs despise "unlimited" plans, can anyone *but* the whales afford it?

Not to mention that 4-10Gs of streamed textures would work much better for latency by residing on an HDD/SDD than temporarily in RAM. Technologically speaking, it sounds like they'd have to rely on expensive Fibre-level network connection speeds to keep up with the prettiness of modern PC games, at least.

Expensive proposition, all around.

All about money

[SoftwareArtist]

a combination of live services, such as FIFA Ultimate Team, and subscriptions will lead to "uncapped" monetisation of its players over the longest possible period of time.

At least he's being honest about what the point is. Companies like to pretend this will be good for gamers, but how many gamers are asking for it? Not a lot. The point is to "monetize players over the longest possible period of time". That is, get more money from you for playing the same games.

Re:Cloud Gaming is an Inevitability

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Except that with Net Neutrality dead, we're headed to a heavily metered and throttled internet. I want my content local to me, not streamed so that I'm paying for it over and over.

FUCK Software as a service.

Stop it!

[KreAture]

I don't want a subscription to all your effing games.
I don't want full catalog access.

I want the single game I like and enjoy to actually work. And keep working.
I want the game to be free of cheaters.
I want the game to be available after "you" deem it time to kill servers and launch another shitty version with new bugs.

Save BF1.

Re:Cloud Gaming is an Inevitability

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with the majority of what you wrote. In the big picture you're on point. Still, I have to argue with this:

Mulitplayer is (and always has been) bigger (and growing) than single player.

MP has not always been bigger. It was a relative rarity in the early days, and since there was no networking, MP only happened by sharing the same screen between two people, which sucks. That, or sharing the same computer, mainframe-text-game style, but that wasn't a "market" per se. Early home computer gaming on Apple II's, TRS, Pets, C64s, etc... it was virtually ALL single player games.

Then networked multiplayer arrived, but you could run it entirely inside your house because you got the game server with the game, like with Diablo, or early shooters. But the servers started to be withheld to gain control over you, and gamers just bent over and said "more please!", so here we are, exactly where a shitload of us said we were gonna end up. Your gaming experience is now totally owned by EVILCORP. You can only play the game as long as they decide to allow you to.

To everyone who lapped that shit up: we tried to warned you. You didn't wanna listen. Now... enjoy, as you are bent over again and again! This is all you, my friends!

Re:Cloud Gaming is an Inevitability

[Anonymous Coward]

So the only question is WHO will control this lucrative market

It's a non-essential industry so, the gamers.

Sorry, but your "inevitability" is only until the majority of gamers say enough is enough, and the industry faces another crash. It's happened before and it can happen again. Look at what happened with the original plans for the X-Bone and PS4. Both were heavily reported on and both plans were scrapped due to public opposition. This can, and hopefully will, suffer a similar fate. If not, then it will happen once the public at large realizes what they have lost, and what is left isn't worth the price that they pay.

Also, a breakdown of your points:

#1 "There is nothing more boring than watching someone else play an RPG." Not every game needs to be a mindless deathmatch game with teams to cheer for. The industry would collapse if it were reduced to e-sports only, as very few non-gamers are going to care about a virtual football player or marine playing the same match again and again*, and most of those that are gamers are going to want to play not watch. Much like the other prosport leagues, only so few can play. That isn't going to be enough to maintain the industry. Because unlike physical sports where games are free to organize and have local matches, practice, and have fun, e-sports currently require purchases from the game companies to even attempt. Which you want to turn into subscriptions and thus have a repeated annual fee to even attempt. That in turn will drastically reduce the number of potential participants and viewers. Because why partake in a league you have to pay to play in? And why watch something that no-one has the foggiest idea about or will recognize? Oops, there just went your fan base for all of those views and AD placements.

* Part of the reason why people watch physical sports is the teamwork showed by the players. How's that work in most competitive e-sports again??? Oh, yeah... Another reason is the physical dedication to the game and the fact the results of that dedication can be applied elsewhere in life, of which doesn't exist for video games. And the ability to show younger kids good role models and that it's something they can work towards themselves. Which as I already stated above, is difficult when it requires an annual / monthly fee, and that any interaction between the players is going to be mostly cursing. Although to be fair the cursing happens with physical sports too, but we as the viewing public don't hear that.

#2 On what planet? Single player games are just as popular as ever, and no one wants a multiplayer only game industry. Well no-one except game industry execs who stand to benefit from such a scenario. I also believe we've tried this before and it bombed spectacularly because it resulted in boring games some people had absolutely no interest in, and that were nothing more than another death match paint job.

#3 is BS in most non-urban areas of the US. A point that will get worse with the repeal of net neutrality.

#4 is also BS. Most people on tablets and other so called "smart" devices don't have nor want to spend the average time it would take to play an RPG, RTS or even an FPS on such a device. It's cumbersome at best, and most of them don't care for such games anyway. They want more Farmville and whatever word King has decided to trademark today. Of which none of them would play if it required a constant and consistent internet connection and a subscription fee to play.

#5 is a different type of media altogether. Non-interactive VS. interactive. With completely different levels of user involvement, usage patterns, and willingness to compromise on comfort / features. Comparing the two and saying that one business method works with X so therefore it will work with Y too. Is such a huge logical fallacy that it's not even worth getting into.

#6 You are right on this point. But IP is not the end all be all and it is also an extreme perversion of the original

Re: The future of copyright

[Cederic]

Welcome to Europe, where that's just bullshit.

https://www.itassetmanagement....

Re:Cloud Gaming is an Inevitability

[Cederic]

Part of the reason why people watch physical sports is the teamwork showed by the players. How's that work in most competitive e-sports again?

Some e-sports are individual affairs. Boxing is tremendously popular and doesn't have much (visible) teamwork.

Some e-sports can only be won by team play. The Rocket League world champs were this weekend, and were won by a team that in the final matchup didn't just coordinate their roles, they explicitly passed the ball between them to break down a very well coordinated defence.

(It still wont reach a wide audience, because the camera direction was fucking terrible, but that's a different issue)