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EA COO Peter Moore has issued a stark warning to his rival publishers – you’ll die off if you’re not ready for the digital transition.
Conceding that a certain element of consolidation is inevitable within the publishing sector over the next few years, Moore emphasized that all publishers need to be strategising in a consumer-lead manner.
Transitions are hard because revenue slows down and costs speed up. You’re getting ready to develop for new platforms, whether they be hardware platforms or software, and it’s getting to be even more complex now,” he told Industry Gamers.
The companies that have prepared themselves and have diversified their offerings to chase the consumer wherever they want to play games are the companies that will succeed and thrive and flourish.
Companies that continue to rely on the old model as the model changes before our eyes, unless they change their ways and invest in the future those companies eventually will die off. No two ways about it.”
As is par for the course, however, Moore accompanied his glorification of the upcoming digital era with a caveat heaping praise on retail and the ongoing importance of boxed product.
The packaged goods business, while still flourishing and strong, eventually – as we’ve seen in music and movies – will go to the cloud,” he continued. It will go digital and we’ll be delivering games from the cloud and delivering games directly to hard drives and we’re still going to sell a lot of discs for the foreseeable future.
But eventually, physical media will diminish as the core part of how gamers get their content. And we’re ready for that, but we’re also still ready to be the number one packaged goods publisher in the world, which we are.
If you want to be a publisher that’s still going to be viable for the consumer 3-4 years from now, you better be ready to deliver your content anytime, anywhere and to everyone.”
