Battlefield 3 subscription?

[PITN]

A copy of the post here. http://www.industrygamers.com/news/ea-praises-call-of-duty-elite-battlefield-subscription-next

EA Praises Call of Duty Elite, Battlefield Subscription Next?

Posted February 1, 2012 by Steve Peterson

Electronic Arts, in their earnings call today, talked at length about their digital revenue which reached over $1 billion dollars for the calendar year. For the entire fiscal year, EA projects their digital revenue to be over $1.2 billion, which will account for more than 25% of their total revenue. EA CEO John Riccitiello said this was due in part to EA's continuing search for best practices; they look at all the different ways they've tried to acquire digital revenue, and take the best ones and apply them to other products and services.

This continuing search for the best practices is not confined to EA's own products, Riccitiello noted. He said ?Frankly, I give a compliment to one of our competitors, who's got a subscription on the back end of an FPS title. I think that's a best-in-class performance.? Clearly he was referring to Activision's Call of Duty Elite subscription service that offers CoD players extra functionality for a monthly price. The Call of Duty Elite service very quickly acquired more than 1 million users, and we'll probably hear more about it when Activision announces its Q3 results soon.

Does this mean we may see a Battlefield 3 subscription service in the future? It seems like something EA would definitely consider, given their growing digital sales. With Battlefield 3 selling more than 11 million copies, it should be no problem getting an audience. It might be smaller than CoD's audience, but it would still be profitable. Don't be surprised if we see an announcement in the near future about a subscription service.


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Steve Peterson has been in the game business for 30 years now, as a designer (co-designer of the Champions RPG among others) and a marketer (for various software companies), and a lecturer. You can read his thoughts on games and marketing at http://20thlevelmarketing.blogspot.com/, or follow him on Twitter @20thLevel.

[=VG= LittleTortiaBoy]

as long as I don't have to pay monthly fees just to play it on the weekend...

[=VG= Outlanders]

Jesus, how much money do they want.