EA has renewed its focus on the PC gaming platform.
In a recent interview with Gamasutra, EA Games president Frank Gibeau indicated that the company's overall strategy to regain marketshare includes a renewed focus in the PC platform. Even more, he admitted that it was "totally conceivable" that the PC will become EA's biggest platform in the near future.
"The user base is gigantic," he said. "PC retail may be a big problem, but PC downloads are awesome. The margins are much better and we don’t have any rules in terms of first party approvals. From our perspective, it's an extremely healthy platform."
Currently all eyes are focused on BioWare's upcoming Star Wars-themed MMOG, Star Wars: The Old Republic. However, EA also has an obvious interest in free-to-play gaming, pointing to the model's success over in China. "If you look at the way people play in Asia, PC is the model," he said. "I think that free to play model is coming to the west in a big way."
EA uses the free-to-play scheme with its online shooter Battlefield Heroes and plans to use the same microtransaction structure in the upcoming PC game Battlefield Play4Free. The latter game is presently in closed beta, but still generating enough revenue to help pay for the game's overall development cost.
EA's revived focus on PC gaming is just a fraction of the company's overall plan to retake the throne as the #1 game publisher in the industry. Its assault arrives on various fronts, from the mobile market to the social network audience to the hardcore console gamer. The company is also seeing a boost in revenue thanks to customers who are purchasing EA IPs across multiple devices (like The Sims 3, Need for Speed Shift etc).
"What we’ve been orienting our company towards is creating IP universes that can exist across those platforms," he said.
EA also plans to move aggressively in the console space for both this generation and the next generation hardware. This isn't surprising given that EA-based console games accounted for 72-percent of its net revenues during the last reported quarter. According to this filing, PC games only generated 14-percent of its net revenue in the same quarter.
At one time, EA was the biggest publisher on the planet. The position was eventually snatched away by Activision Blizzard. However Gibeau believes EA's overall plan will bring the stocks back to their previous heights. "Our earnings are up. We’re on our way back," he said. "If we hadn’t made the changes we did, if we had just kept iterating game after game, we would be irrelevant and in far worse shape than we are now."
See, PC gaming isn't dead, and may save EA from irrelevancy in the long run.
Someone is finally realizing that consoles are a dead end platform. Especially the current generation, being so old.
It probably comes down to their programmers are bored writing the same stuff over and over again, and want to explore the new technologies available on the PC, eg DX11.
This bodes well for Battlefield 3
Agreed, I did a subject in 10th grade where we actually learnt all about researching components for a custom built PC, then ordered them and built the PCs ourselves. We need more of this.
If you can build a PC, you sure as hell can work out Office lol..
I'm sure as hell glad BF3 is using the PC as a lead platform xD
Yes, the part I like best about Valve is that they don't use any additional 3rd Party DRM beyond their Steam client. I hope EA learns to stop incorporating SecuROM and whats-its into it's products. I still have yet to play an EA title...
i got yelled at one day. the teacher was out, a common thing in out class. i wanted to get that crap out of the way, because programming was far more interesting to me, so i spent 30+ minutes building the pc, this was a highschool class, the pc's were free, but replacements for what was already in the class. the teacher pops in for 5 minutes at the end of class, sees the computer reformatting, and got mad... you know what its like being suspended for actually knowing how to do things... it wasn't my first time being in trouble for knowing more than my teachers, in middle school i was doing html, the teacher was teaching the rest of the class how to use a wysiwyg editter, i was in notepad doing html. 5 minutes latter, she comes by me... mad, and tried to delete what i did, but i saved before hand, and imported the code to the wysiwyg program, and was done. hello middle school office, im here for the day on an in school suspension for not being stupid.
i was really the only kid in school, who was smart, that teachers dreaded teaching, because i would eventually know more than them, or do better than them (art or shop classes) if i took an interest in what they were teaching.
Oh, you mean, that argument was total BS? Nice to know.
LOL. What planet are you from?
WTF? have you heard of D2 LOD? or warcraft? or starcraft? probably the worlds biggest games of their time right along with Counter strike. I love Blizzard and EA my fave two companies right along with Steam for making it possible to load all my games steam or not into their interface and launch them all from there and for greatest games ever for cheap prices even when stores don't sell them anymore