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EA sees subscription and live services as way to 'uncapped' monetisation

EA sees subscription and live services as way to 'uncapped' monetisation

Publisher EA believes that a combination of subscription and live games services is the key to generating revenue.

That's going by what CFO Blake Jorgensen said at the UBS Global Technology Conference, as reported by GamesIndustry.biz, in which the exec discussed its live service schemes like FIFA Ultimate team.

"If you have a live service component to [games on EA Access and Origins Access], you can have a subscription that's uncapped," he said.

"Give people a way to spend money on things they want to do and that they enjoy doing vs simply capping them at $9 or $10 per month and that's all they can ever spend.

"We find people play twice as many games, they spend twice as long on them, and they spend twice as much money, because you've reduced the cost of trial to close to zero."

Furthermore, the exec believes that the traditional £40-to-50 for a game is actually a hinderance to its performance.

"Maybe they went into the subscription to play Star Wars, they try Madden, they find out they like the game, like playing Madden Ultimate Team, and then may spend money on Ultimate Team," he said.

"It's a great consumer offering, but it's also for us a much more stable business, an easier business for us to run long-term and doesn't have the same limited cap that most subscriptions would have."

All of which will do nothing to help the narrative that triple-A games companies are moving away from single player games to service-based experiences.

Jorgensen also dropped some hints about what we can expect from Jade Raymond's project from EA Motive.

""We have a team in Montreal that is building a brand new action franchise, probably for our Fiscal [Year] 2021 that also looks fantastic and very exciting," he said.

"A new game, with a lot of new interesting gameplay that I don't think anyone's ever seen before."

He continued: "Action is clearly the place we're missing the most, and the reason we're building Anthem and the new title that Jade Raymond's team at Motive is building in Montreal. That's the largest sector in gaming. It's one we haven't spent a lot of time in because we were so focused on sports and first-person shooters. We feel like there's a huge opportunity there."

 


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.