For those of you who wince every time you crack open your wallet to buy a retail game, there’s someone in the industry who feels your pain. Ben Cousins, general manager of Electronic Arts’ Easy Studios feels it’s an unfair way to do business, to force a consumer to purchase an expensive game, one they may end up not liking at all.
In an interview with UK-based gaming blog Rock, Paper Scissors, Cousins said, “I can’t think of anything more exploitative than gating all of your content behind having to pay someone $60. That’s a really harsh business model if you think about it objectively.”
Cousins further predicts that the game industry is going to the Web, away from dedicated hardware in which the priciest content is delivered. “I think we’re going to get to the point quickly where on the “open” platforms — so PC, Mac, Linux, Android, Chrome potentially — developers are going to become platform agnostic … I see the future being guys on PCs playing this stuff, but they will be playing with guys on Android Tablets and Mac Netbooks, etc, etc.”
Easy Studios is Electronic Arts’ free-to-play division, offering such titles as Battlefield Heroes, Battle Forge, and Lord of Ultima. These titles can be played for free, but players can opt in to microtransaction purchases for various upgrades for the character and their gear. Electronic Arts, however, is subsidized.
However, much of EA’s most valuable product line remains those $60 games Cousins focuses his criticism on. Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello’s point of view, while more neutral in character, parallels what Cousin feels about the direction of the industry. In a recent interview with IndustryGamer, EA’s chief said, “At the end of [2011], the digital business is bigger than the packaged goods business, full stop. No questions in my mind. Then, you know, I think that we’ll find ways to even sell our packaged goods content in chunks and in pieces and subscriptions and microtransactions.”
Translated: Fewer shrinkwrapped retail boxes from EA (and likely other publishers) with $59.99 price tags and more free-to-play games with opt-in content to purchase.
[Source: CNET]
Fast forward several days… and voila, there’s an interesting postscript: Ben Cousins is leaving EA for greener pastures before the April 4th beta test of Battlefield Play4Free. Interestingly, his clock ticking down at EA also might explain his candid remarks about the retail game industry, in which EA is still a very significant player.