EA's Riccitiello says game discs aren't going away
While Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello thinks digital distribution will finally outstrip its physical counterpart in 2011, he stops short of predicting the demise of retail packaging. In the second part of an interview conducted by Industry Gamers, the EA bossman sings the praises of the disc and debunks trendy cloud computing-based notions of gaming's near future.
"Sometimes you're not going to play because your internet connection is down and sometimes delivering a game by streaming is a really inefficient way to do it," Riccitiello says, in what might be music to the ears of gaming luddites dismayed at the thought of renouncing actual ownership of their collections. Riccitiello goes on to posit that services like OnLive will struggle with latency-dependent titles (your average first person shooter, for example) and ultimately concludes that the days of 100% digital delivery are pretty far into the future.
