Says Electronic Arts

Mar 25, 2010 10:31 GMT  ·  By

Electronic Arts has rejected a suggestion from Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan, that it will begin charging for videogame demos. The company has said that it plans to explore new strategies with its future titles.

Michael Pachter wrote that “The PDLC would be sold for $10 or $15 through Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, and would essentially be a very long game demo, along the lines of 2009’s Battlefield 1943.” Apparently, the current head of Visceral Games has suggested to the analyst that this could be a good way of marketing a game while allowing player feedback on the initial package to influence the way the full length is put together. The analyst has pointed to Battlefield 1943 as one of the games that could have used this strategy.

Mr. Pachter is also saying that the model Electronic Arts used with Mass Effect 2 from BioWare and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 from DICE will be extended to most of its titles, with “ancillary digital revenue streams” attached to future launches.

Jeff Brown, the vice president of corporate communications at Electronic Arts, reacted to the note from Pachter and told Gamasutra that his company “is working on a number of projects for delivering premium content to consumers before, during, and after the launch of a packaged-goods version of the game” and that free game demos will remain free even if other game-related content could be delivered for a price as part of game promotion strategies created by EA Sports, EA Games and EA Play.

Interestingly, Sony recently patented a system that would allow the player to get the full game experience as part of a demo for a few hours, with some of the features decaying after that and a prompt urging them to buy the game in order to restore them. It seems that the world of videogame demos as we know it is set to change.