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.

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

[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

[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

The complete theft...

[blahplusplus]

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

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: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.