Battlefield subscription: EA's "looking at it"

Battlefield subscription: EA's "looking at it"

Thu 15 Mar 2012 2:43pm GMT / 10:43am EDT / 7:43am PDT
GamesOnlinePublishing

EA's clearly been inspired by Call of Duty Elite

EA DICE

dice.se

Electronic Arts

ea.com

Call of Duty Elite has been garnering plenty of attention, and Electronic Arts has clearly taken notice of its rival's success, as the company has now admitted that it's "looking at" a possible subscription service for Battlefield too.

When asked by VentureBeat about the chances of EA launching an Elite-like service for its shooter, EA Games label head Patrick Soderlund responded, "I think it's fair to say that we're looking at that. Like all other companies, we're looking at how we can maximize our investment in this and get the most out of our investment and get more people playing this product. That may take us to different places, but we're not really talking about where that is yet."

Ultimately, games like Call of Duty or Battlefield are becoming services that require constant attention by their respective publishers to keep gamers entertained.

"We look at it as a 24/7 service. We have people in Stockholm and North America and other parts of the world that are on this every single hour of every single day. 365 days a year," Soderlund said.

"We have an operations team at DICE to look at telemetry data. How are people playing the game, how can we improve the experience? Are they having problems? Are servers down? Are they up? All that stuff."

While EA would certainly love to dominate the shooter genre, there's no denying that it's done quite well with Battlefield 3, which shipped 12 million copies to retail last year. Soderlund is more than happy with EA's place in the market.

"When it comes to taking Call of Duty down, you know what? I don't look at it like that. We are in this business because we want to make the best possible products. Call of Duty is a shooter, but it's a different shooter. And I think they have a market; we have a market. I'm fine with what I'm doing," he continued.

"I'm going to continue innovating and doing as best as I can with my teams. Hopefully that's going to lead us to more units [sold] and more happy consumers."

4 Comments

Morville O'Driscoll
Games Blogger & Journalist

""I think it's fair to say that we're looking at that. Like all other companies, we're looking at how we can maximize our investment in this and get the most out of our investment and get more people playing this product. That may take us to different places, but we're not really talking about where that is yet." "

Bolded parts can be reduced to - make more money, make more money, get more players. So... contradictory, surely?

I suppose it's indicative of how companies view their products, as well as their bottom lines. Activision see players as cash-cows - old engine, paid subscription system straight away. EA see them as kind of cash-cows who are smarter than the average - new engine, and they saw how many people complained about the CoD Elite service and said "No", but are having second thoughts ( http://playstationlifestyle.net/2011/09/26/ea-says-no-to-subscription-model-another-feather-in-battlefield-3s-cap/ ). Valve, meanwhile, took TF2 Free 2 Play, constantly update it, and make money off of hats.

Edited 1 times. Last edit by Morville O'Driscoll on 15th March 2012 3:50pm

Posted:A year ago

#1

Jeffrey Ates
Critic/Writer/Enthusiast

And THIS is why the rise of indies is inevitable. Consider games like Ravaged, Natural Selection 2, Hawken and Overgrowth. All are prime examples of tripple A dev quality games, at half the cost or less. The Big guys will be falling pretty soon...

Posted:A year ago

#2

Jack Lee

I think it's perfectly legitimate for EA to consider a subscription option for Battlefield. It's such a huge game, and requires such a huge effort on their part to maintain, that they definitely need to look at all the options available to wring the most money out of it. Is the answer to that subscription, F2P, constant paid DLC? That's for the analysts and market researchers (like myself) to figure out. I wouldn't be surprised if the maximum profit comes from a free-to-play model, but those can be quite risky if it doesn't catch on.

Posted:A year ago

#3

Ken Addeh

I understand companies need to get some investment in as updates they do take a few resources, but I don't see anything that BF3 can do to make players Sub when they've got charged DLC in the works.

As of late, there have been more updates to Battlelog than to the game itself, which is frustrating to say the least - I'm not too sure I'd want to pay MMO rates for a game that has not demonstrated aggressive patching to warrant payment for upkeep. Perhaps this is something slated for BFBC3 or BF4?

Then again, this is just talks about it being added. Who knows when, where and at what capacity.

Posted:A year ago

#4

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