Origin platform exclusives “made sense”, more to come – EA
Lewis Denby June 29, 2011 - 8:23 amHaving some games exclusive to EA’s own digital download service Origin is good business sense, says Frank Gibeau – and anyway, how is it any different to Uncharted only coming out for PS3?
Electronic Arts have come under some flak for announcing that Star Wars: The Old Republic – and other PC games in the future – will be exclusively available through EA’s new digital download service, Origin.
Now, EA’s Frank Gibeau has confirmed that more exclusives will likely arrive in the future. And he thinks this is the sensible decision when trying to launch a platform.
“For us it made sense to make this move and grow the platform this way,” he explained.
“We are going to continue to be great partners for our retail channel partners and as they evolve their business models to account for digital. But at the same time you talk about platform exclusives like Halo or Uncharted, EA’s going to have some of our own platform exclusives.”
Certainly, not every PC game from EA is going to come out solely via Origin. It depends on the game, and whether it would be suited to that exclusivity, according to Gibeau.
“It depends on the title and what we’re trying to do. In the case of Star Wars we’re trying to build an audience for Origin,” he explained in an interview with GI.biz.
“And it’s also an opportunity for us to better manage the downloads and how we bring people over from the beta and that sort of thing. For a lot of reasons it made sense for an MMO, which is a highly complex deployment.”
He continued: “I think long-term you’ll see we believe in reach so we will have other digital retailers for out products because we want to reach as many audiences as possible.
“But at the same time if we can use exclusive content or other ideas to help grow our audience then we’re going to do that because we’re growing a platform.”
Comments (1)
It makes sense for a platform holder to hold exclusives for their platforms – it’s the simple ‘USP’ argument, but forcing people to use a specific service on a platform rather than their preferred one?
What a fucked up statement by a man who really doesn’t understand the PC at all!