EA Investigating “Free-to-Start” Console Gaming
- gamersunitedgg
- Jan 28, 2015
- 1 min read
Electronic Arts CEO, Andrew Wilson, spoke about the major role free-to-play experiences may play in the future of the company’s console games. EA has a large free-to-play business on PC and mobile, but how does this publisher view the business model for consoles?
Wilson stated that in the future he thinks gamers (trained by media) will expect console games to be available for free, then pay later. Wilson said EA is “actively” investigating how they can meet this consumer desire for future console projects.
“On free-to-play, with consoles, we think about this much the way that we think about free-to-play overall. There’s a couple of different vectors to this,” Wilson said. “The first is as we look to the future, we believe a very big part of our player-base will expect a free-to-start experience. When we look at film, television, music, books, very often there is this free trial notion that actually onboards new players, new listeners, new readers, or new viewers into a service. We’re actively looking at how we could offer that type of experience to our players on console and across other platforms.”
EA is not planning on giving away console games for free during this scenario as Wilson said the next step is to offer a free-to-start player a full-game download, microtransaction, subscription, or maybe all three. Wilson hopes to offer all three business model options across consoles and other platforms in the future.
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