Ex-EA exec: "EA is in the wrong business"
Former EA executive Mitch Lasky has called his old employer out on having the wrong business model.
Writing on Bizpunk (via BluesNews), the former executive vice president of mobile and online implied EA was being naive in how it planned for a digital future.
"EA is in the wrong business, with the wrong cost structure and the wrong team, but somehow they seem to think that it is going to be a smooth, two-year transition from packaged goods to digital," said Mitch, who is now a partner at tech investment firm Benchmark Capital.
Mitch writes about a proposal he once presented to the company that involved cutting costs and preparing the company for a games-as-services approach to business, but says he was shot down immediately.
"They literally couldn't imagine going to Wall Street with a message of increased profitability rather than top-line revenue growth."
"The old EA model was a basically a three-legged stool: 1) a profitable, recurring sports business (Madden, FIFA); 2) franchise games that produced big hits on a less frequent basis (The Sims, Need for Speed, Command & Conquer); and 3) a collection of digital assets (e.g.: Pogo & JAMDAT, and now Playfish) and distribution/partnership titles (e.g.: Rock Band & Left 4 Dead). Of those, the only stool leg left intact is the third one. Without the digital assets and the EA Distribution titles, they'd be in even more serious hot water."
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Discuss in the forums Replyhowever i did like the way blizzard manages its digital downloads
This being the problem with most big businesses at the moment.
Andy
and what the game developers sell them for is low its the console creators that make them more expensive and shops and online stores could easily double the price
Digital distribution actually works out better for me in this regard. I've lost count of the number of times I've lost or damaged game discs, loaned them to someone and not got them back, or lost the game manual with the license key and had to buy a new copy. No such problems with digital media, although admittedly I can't sell them on after I'm done with them any more.
Meh, I regularly use 120-160GB a month on my £10 20mbps unlimited connection and don't get throttled, and that's mostly heavy Steam usage.
DD is a must but you still need to have shelf copies to meet the non-internet consumer demand.
That's the worst of both worlds. I wouldn't rely on the Store if I were EA, at least not until I'd checked out this tiny little 13-employee startup called 'Steam.'
i also like having a physical copy of a game/CD/DVD etc. I'm a bit of a collector that way and it looks good having a big stack of boxes next to your pc/hi-fi/tv.
I just wonder how they make money off of all their sales though? Do they pay a license fee to the game publisher and then they sell as many copies of that game as they want or do they pay a fee to the publisher for every copy bought by customers?
Dont feel ashamed to copy STEAM... but their current EA Store is not viable as a long term competitor.
Act now... or in 3 to 5yrs time be prepared to be bought out by VALVE.
The logical thing to do is pick up a stack of DVD-RWs for £nothing, and use Steam's backup-local-files utility (which compresses things nicely). Saves an absolute stack of time.
Unfortunately I have. I seem to remember buying a copy of BF2 or BF2142 on there a while back, and the download speeds were so awful and the software so annoying that I haven't dared go near it since.
It seems like EA have already given up on relying their own download service and released a lot of their most popular back catalogue titles on Steam. Even if they did release another one, no one would use it now that Steam has such a large share of the market unless their prices were ridiculously low.
that guy sounds bitter :o
Ah yes, who could forget that particular cash cow ;)
EA shouldn't copy steam, it should just use steam like it already does and provide some hard copy for those who don't use downloads. I don't get how this can be blamed for any failures - it's not like any of us have trouble buying EA games if we wanted one?
Basically EA will make money if they make good games and hence sell a lot. If the games aren't good enough they won't. It's not rocket science.
EA wont want to release everything via STEAM as they will then be giving a cut to Valve. If their own distribution platform was a good as STEAM in every possible way then they would take the extra margin as income, rather than having to give it Valve instead.
Few years and it will take over retail. But it is NOT a positive thing as many like to put it. The game-as-a-service model is very very bad for most of us. You will pay a lot more for games as it is a model based on tighter control. When it becomes the norm you simply cut the retail channel and your online distribution channel can be the only line of revenue. And everything will be done with micro transactions. Right now companies are testing how customers react to this new models. Are they willing to play extra for a few more weapons? Look at all those collector edditions, digital download special editions and so on.
+1
It about time they smelt the coffee.
In my (direct) experience EA 'support' is a joke and Steam Support (with practically no staff!!) is really brilliant and has a faster response...
In regard to DD vs retail channel/physical media I much prefer Steam/DD as well. Valve go to a lot of effort to make Steam run on multiple platforms e.g. Wine under Linux, etc. There is flexibility about installing the game a number of times and on different machines (simultaneously). The facility to re-download the game years later and/or backup locally allows the best of both worlds.
The same can not be said for EA with it's god awful Sony DRM crap on the physical media. (Though to be fair some publishers still include the DRM on the Steam distribution - that is a truly evil decision!!)
Bob
I read ages ago that Valve charges 50% of the sales price for their 'fee' for distributing by Steam. But I can not confirm that. It would however go some way to explain why for a digital version of a game Valve charge more than most bricks and mortar stores for the same item, especially for AAA titles.
i bet you are with o2 for yourt internet though, they dont throttle you like bt
BUT THEN - How many gaming stores will close down, how many people who work in the factories making the booklets will loose their jobs etc?
That doesnt sound good! Its totally the opposite of how things should be going...the government should be increasing bandwidth...the internet moves society forwards!
Funny fact about the throttling / cutting off for using the internet "too much", you can download a entire album in mp3 format and cause less traffic than downloading a nvidia graphicsdriver, yet they tell who is the evil pirate by looking at the amount of data transferred. On a similar note, count the pirated movies you can download while still causing less traffic than buying the Orange Box on Steam yet guess which one makes the isp go nuts.