EA CFO Blake Jorgensen talks at the UBS conference. EA expands into action gaming and also into family gaming. Also, he gives his opinion on the mobile market and micro transactions as EA expands into mobile gaming. In addition, he speaks about EA access.
Let’s start with EA access. EA access is a subscription based game service where you can play EA games without buying them as long as you have a subscription. In addition to that, it gives you early access to their upcoming games and a discount to buy said games. Currently, they have 14 games on there right now. EA believes this helps deliver their games to consumers who have lower bandwidth and, it is an opportunity to gauge their customer base. In addition to EA access, they have made a gaming channel with Comcast.
Blake Jorgensen also talked about EA in the mobile marketplace. To sum it all up, EA uses their licensed IP to make mobile games IP that most consumers know and that sticks out. On to everyone’s favorite topic: micro-transactions. Blake believes that micro-transactions are necessary for a mobile game to strive but shouldn’t be used to progress the game.
Now to the hot topic of this panel: EA expanding into action and family genre of gaming. Well, EA already started getting into family games with acquiring pop top and releasing Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare, which is set to have its second game in the series released this winter. EA recently hired Jade Raymond. who is behind Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise to lead a new studio in Montreal. EA is wanting to make the next big action game and are ready to do so as Blake Jorgensen says, “We’ve never really operated in the largest genre of gaming, and that’s the action genre. That’s the Assassin’s Creed-style games; more open-world, more single-play versus multiplayer. It’s not been an area that we’ve operated in. We recently hired Jade Raymond, who was behind the Assassin’s Creed franchise for Ubisoft and she will be building an action genre for us through a studio we’re building out in Montreal right now. So a lot of excitement around the action genre.”
Are you planning on getting EA access or already have it? Hoping to see a great action game come out of EA we at Gamespresso are if you are too leave a comment below and we hope you enjoyed your sip of Gamespresso.