EA CEO says digital gaming sales will overtake console numbers next year
By Joshua Topolsky 
posted December 2nd 2009 5:23PM
posted December 2nd 2009 5:23PM
He went on to say that if EA's digital arm was a standalone company, "it would be like the darling of Wall Street." Of course, he's not just talking about XBLA and the App Store -- this is an all-encompassing view of the digital market, including casual gaming, Facebook apps, and WoW transactions as well. It may not be the kind of all-encompassing push needed, but we are hoping this sort of noise rattles the industry enough to mobilize smarter, more centralized methods of online distribution."When people think of games, they traditionally think, in the U.S., of what sells on the Xbox, the PlayStation, and the Wii, and they forget about all these online services that are out there... if you add all that stuff up, it's almost half the industry now. It's about 40 to 45 percent. Next year it's likely to be the larger share of the total industry and it'll be bigger than the console games all put together."
@Nisamun network speeds have been on a constant and steep rise ever since the first spider started spinning the web with constantly upgrading networks.
Comcast are just greedy bastards, and they will cap customers only as long as they maintain area monopolies. More likely, our future will pan out similar to South Korea today, w/ fiber in every home and no unreasonable caps.
Even WoW is using P2P now, which w/ a fast network can translate into amazing transfer rates for customers. Fast game downloads on the go w/ no physical disks to lose or get scratched or pieces of paper w/ CD codes to hold onto.
If and when providers like Comcast allow up to 50+Mbps, consoles come with 2TB hard drives and we have the ability to sell digital rights to a third party (aka used games) then sure I'd be on board.
Somehow I don't see any of that happening in the near future so I will stick to my archaic physical media.
Digital sales from PSPGO must be off the charts!
@memaf
It's called the iPhone/iPod touch.... *ahem...
No one actually bought the PSPgo
what happens when you have make room for more games do you delete the game in order to download new ones? can't trade games in like FYE, GameStop for points towards new ones.
someone tell this guy to shuttup. i hate all these people saying digital downloads are the way of the future, when we aren't even close to having the infrastructure up for it. the more i hear about ISPs wanting to limit/thottle my bandwidth, the more i tend to dismiss these claims of an all digital future. unless he's talking about PSP games, and DSi games...thats different. but u show me the day when a PS3 comes w/ a 2TB HDD built in, and when att doesn't mind me downloading 25/50GBs a pop for my games...well, i'll eat my hat.
I know everyone else already made the same points, but to have digital distribution fully replace physical games we need:
1. MUCH faster internet so games don't take hours to download.
2. No per-month caps, so gamers don't have to worry about hitting their limits.
3. No DRM, or much less. I can bring my Wii games to a friend's house to play or loan a friend a game if his copy broke. Can't do that with Steam games.
4. Hard drive sizes will need to keep going up (they are, so this point is somewhat taken care of.)
And even then I would still prefer physical disks, for displaying purposes and the satisfaction of actually holding my game.
Lie2me
I couldn't care less about EA's opinion. I've been boycotting EA ever since the Spore debacle...
EA CEOs just wanna have fun—