In a recent interview with Reuters news service, Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello managed to put a positive spin on the relatively dreary Thanksgiving and Christmas season games sales thus far, and managed to drop a relative industry bombshell…all within the same interview.
What makes the statement remarkable, is that Riccitiello sits as the man in charge of the world’s largest video game developer – a firm that’s traditionally focused on pricey, glossy boxed, console focused games. However, Riccitiello took the interview time to point out that projects have been afoot at EA for a while now, almost predicting the coming tide.
“A couple of years ago EA embarked on a plan to really build itself up in this new frontier. In the last quarter alone we did $138 million in revenue and if EA’s digital business were a stand alone company it would be the darling of Wall Street,” Riccitiello said.
He also went on to tell Reuters that consumers often forget about online browser based games including social games often found on Facebook, as well as MMO’s such as Warhammer Online, subscription and microtransaction based games, and claimed that this sector is now, “almost half the industry now. It’s about 40-45 percent. Next year it’s likely to have a larger share in the entire industry, bigger than all the console games put together.”
And as we’ve previously speculated – EA’s recent acquisition of social gaming company Playfish is just a further move towards dominating the digital front, as it has done successfully with the brick and mortar storefront. “It’s an on-purpose transformation,” Riccitiello says. “We’re trying to become a company that looks more like a direct-to-consumer business.”
With this announcement, it might be easy to say, ‘but wait…what about console gamers – are they being abandoned?’ Not at all according to Riccitiello. He notes that his optimism towards new models should not be seen as pessimism towards existing models. “We intend to be the number one packaged goods publisher in the world,” he says.
Tags: EA, electronic arts, Facebook, john riccitiello, PlayFish
