14 DAY TRIAL // The new Chief Operations Officer of video game publisher Electronic Arts has said that his company might soon rival Facebook, Google and Amazon when it comes to the way it delivers its content to customers.
Talking to Screenplay Peter Moore has said that, “I think what we have done is redefine what a publisher in interactive entertainment means in the modern era. We’re closer now when we look at the industry to being a peer of a Facebook, or a Google, or even an Amazon, or in our world a Comcast, which is a major distributor of content by cable, than we are a publisher of video game discs sold through retail.”
He says that in the future EA is interested not in selling games but in offerings experiences that can happen via a disk that goes into a home console or by logging into a website from a range of devices in order to play the same game.
Moore says that for the last few years the publisher was busy creating the infrastructure needed for its move towards the digital space and that it will begin reaping the results this year and the next.
Even success is no longer tracked using traditional metrics, with Moore saying, “It would be very difficult to track EA’s number of ‘units sold’ when we’re so powerful now on Facebook. How does one equate for the 67 million people in two months that are now playing The Sims Social?”
The Facebook spin-off derived from the Sims franchise has managed to become an instant hit, with some analysts saying that it will soon become more popular than Zynga titles on the social service.
Moore also estimated that more than 1.5 billion people in the world are now playing games, on devices ranging from consoles and the PC to smartphones, and that Electronic Arts is trying to reach as many of them as possible.