EA explains NFS Shift DLC and other Origin exclusives
Frank Gibeau, president of the EA Games label, spoke in an interview today about its new digital download service, Origin, and what we can expect from them in the future.
He spoke to Gamesindustry.biz about the challenges of breaking into the market of digital games distribution when Steam is the obvious market leader. Gibeau said that EA has a goal of eventually becoming the worldwide leader, and exclusives will be a big part of what gets them there.
"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," said Gibeau.
"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 then went on to explain how the Origin exclusivity of Star Wars: The Old Republic figured into that. "In the case of Star Wars we're trying to build an audience for Origin," he said.
"For a lot of reasons it made sense for an MMO, which is a highly complex deployment... 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."