Hey everyone, relax. EA is here to put your mind at ease and in speaking with GI.biz, they talk briefly about exclusives for Origin with EA's Frank Gibeau.
Gibeau continued to talk in depth about Origin and EA's plans for Nintendo, budget triple-A titles, and more.
Star Wars: The Old Republic is a digital exclusive to Origin - should we expect more PC digital titles to be exclusive to Origin?
Frank Gibeau: It depends on the title and what we're trying to do. In the case of Star Wars we're trying to build an audience for Origin. And it's also an opportunity for us to better manage the downloads and how we bring people over from the beta and that sort of thing. For a lot of reasons it made sense for an MMO, which is a highly complex deployment. I think long-term you'll see we believe in reach so we will have other digital retailers for out products because we want to reach as many audiences as possible. But at the same time if we can use exclusive content or other ideas to help grow our audience then we're going to do that because we're growing a platform.
But it's more than exclusive content, it's an entirely new game based on one of the biggest entertainment franchises ever. Is there a danger of alienating your retail partners by only releasing it digitally via Origin?
Frank Gibeau: For us it made sense to make this move and grow the platform this way. We are going to continue to be great partners for our retail channel partners and as they evolve their business models to account for digital. But at the same time you talk about platform exclusives like Halo or Uncharted, EA's going to have some of our own platform exclusives.
Frank Gibeau: It depends on the title and what we're trying to do. In the case of Star Wars we're trying to build an audience for Origin. And it's also an opportunity for us to better manage the downloads and how we bring people over from the beta and that sort of thing. For a lot of reasons it made sense for an MMO, which is a highly complex deployment. I think long-term you'll see we believe in reach so we will have other digital retailers for out products because we want to reach as many audiences as possible. But at the same time if we can use exclusive content or other ideas to help grow our audience then we're going to do that because we're growing a platform.
But it's more than exclusive content, it's an entirely new game based on one of the biggest entertainment franchises ever. Is there a danger of alienating your retail partners by only releasing it digitally via Origin?
Frank Gibeau: For us it made sense to make this move and grow the platform this way. We are going to continue to be great partners for our retail channel partners and as they evolve their business models to account for digital. But at the same time you talk about platform exclusives like Halo or Uncharted, EA's going to have some of our own platform exclusives.
Gibeau continued to talk in depth about Origin and EA's plans for Nintendo, budget triple-A titles, and more.