John Riccitiello is the former CEO of EA and is currently an investor in many gaming companies. Last week he spoke at the Gaming Insider Summit (via TheAListDaily), where he talked about the importance of brands within the entertainment industry, inspired by how A Tale of Two Cities is the #1 selling book with 200 million copies sold since 1859:
Call of Duty alone has $1.8 billion in a year, FIFA is over a billion dollars in a year. My guess is, and I’ve done the math, is that five, and possibly seven, of the best-selling intellectual properties in the history of entertainment going back to 1859 are console games, with one PC game. They must have done something right.
He also extended his talk to what he thinks console game makers could learn from mobile titles, giving out his honest thoughts on what he thinks of charging people $60 for a game:
More than anything, what the traditional game industry should learn from mobile is it’s really about service. It’s an ongoing business. You’d think we would have learned this some time ago, but I find it interesting that WoW and Sim City and GTA and Starcraft and many other games all fell over at launch when they put their service components together. Some of the biggest brands – I’d argue almost all the biggest brands – fell over from lack of the testing and research that mobile people do in the regular course of their day.
Another thing that console and PC guys could and should learn is variable pricing. $60 is a giant FU to a very large number of people. There’s not been a console game with even half as many installs as Clash of Clans. Puzzle & Dragons has got more installs than any console game in history. Getting a larger audience through variable pricing is a really useful thing.
Do you think console and PC game makers should adopt more of a variable pricing structure? Let us know in the comments below.
[Via]
