14 DAY TRIAL // Electronic Arts has once again highlighted its belief in free-to-play games, and how they're becoming extremely profitable for the company, just like any console or PC game, while reaching new markets that aren't so receptive to normal, retail games.
Free-to-Play games are one of the industry's current hot topics, after Valve turned its Team Fortress 2 online shooter completely free-to-play, while Blizzard has just announced that people can try out its massively popular World of Warcraft MMORPG for free up until level 20, out of a total of 85.
As you can imagine, Electronic Arts, one of the leading companies in terms of free games, has once again highlighted its belief in this market segment, and emphasized that with the right content, investments and marketing, free games, which base their income on microtransactions, can become even more profitable than regular consoles games, while reaching markets that aren't as open to retail titles than the UK or North American one.
"We're aggressively investing in things that are very low cost like free-to-play. The free-to-play group inside of EA Games is growing extremely fast - we've got 17 million users," said EA Games label head Frank Gibeau to GI.biz.
"Frankly when they get to scale, have huge audiences, are very profitable, they're not cannibalizing the main games and they actually reach markets that we're not currently serving. With Need for Speed World, Russia and Brazil are number one and two - the Ukraine is in there too. I can't sell packaged goods in those territories."
Need for Speed World is an online, free-to-play racing game, combining the best aspects of previous titles like NFS: Most Wanted, Carbon or Undercover, separately from the experiences seen in retail NFS games like Hot Pursuit, Shift 2 Unleashed, or the upcoming NFS: The Run.
"I'm reaching an audience with Need for Speed content. It's an engine that's not as advanced as Frostbite 2 but it's certainly got great production values and great game designs, and it's free-to-play with micro-transactions. It's a very exciting time from our perspective because it's not all about consoles. It's about smartphones, tablets, free-to-play, browser, social,” added Gibeau.
EA currently has available free games like the aforementioned Need for Speed World, as well as shooters like Battlefield Heroes or Battlefield Play4Free, and plenty of other experiences.