GamesIndustry recently published a rather interesting interview with Peter Moore as he attempts to explain EA's often-controversial business practices and the public's reaction to them. The article was reposted with a headline that said EA "blames their own customers" for failing to see the changing winds, though I think the issue is a bit more nuanced than that.
I don't think Moore gets it quite right though, particularly when he starts saying how video games need to avoid the fate of the music industry.
"We as an industry have to embrace change," he explains. "We can't be music. We cannot be music.
"Because music said, 'Screw you. You're going to buy a CD for $16.99, and we're going to put 14 songs on there, two of which you care about, but you're going to buy our CD.' Then Shawn Fanning writes a line of code or two, Napster happens, and the consumers take control. Creating music to sell is no longer a profitable concern. The business model has changed to concerts, corporate concerts, merchandise, things of that nature. Actually selling music is not a way of making money any more, except for a core group."
The point here is that the model changed for music, and if EA (and the industry as a whole) doesn't think of new revenue streams quickly, they'll share the same fate of the product they sell not making them much money. Hence the rise of free-to-play games stuffed with microtransactions, something that's proved so popular in the mobile sector. He says "core" gamers dislike this practice, but they're missing the bigger picture.
The Fight For The Future Of Video Games is a warts-and-all look at the clashes between the video game business and its passionate fans.
I think Moore is the one missing the lesson of the music industry, and I'm not sure the situation is even comparable to gaming in the way he wants it to be.
The music industry and the games industry face opposite distribution problems. Music fans disliked the idea that they were forced to buy an entire album, when they'd much rather have the option to purchase individual songs for cheaper. Out of this philosophy (and the fact that CDs were too pricey to begin with) Napster was born. The piracy platform was eventually legalized (and then killed), but that paved the way for the industry-standard iTunes today.
Gamers have opposite problem as the industry continues to grow. Years ago, no one was complaining about their ability to purchase complete games for a set price, and there wasn't some idea that they wished that they could simply the first three levels of Sonic the Hedgehog for $10, and skip the rest if they wanted. Other than the fact that the overall price may have been a bit too high for some, the issue was not about what was packaged together in that purchase price.
But now that's exactly the problem.
The industry is breaking up content despite the protests of fans, not because of them. It's why we see the rise of games that cost $60 plus another $60 or more of DLC, when such a thing wasn't even thinkable previously. And now this is why there are "free-to-play" games that feel like shells unless you spend $1, $5, $10 a time in order to populate them with more items, characters, content or simply buying the ability to play the game more, skipping arbitrary wait timers inserted to frustrate you into spending more money. It's as progressive an idea as feeding coins into an arcade machine thirty years ago.
This is the problem "core" gamers have, because it looks like the gaming industry is actually doing the opposite of what the music industry did. Developers and publishers are taking something people wanted as a whole experience, and breaking it into tiny pieces for distribution. A more appropriate comparison would be the TV and music industries, where people are tired of paying for bloated cable packages, and are desperate to subscribe by the channel, or simply purchase/stream individual shows.
The comparison doesn't really work in the video game realm. Moore complains that making music itself is not a way to make money anymore, and that it would be disastrous for video games to follow the same path.
And yet, the music industry still exists, and I doubt anyone other than record label execs are complaining about the demise of the $17 CD. Change was good for the industry in many ways, even if it went against corporate interests at the time. Moore is speaking out of concern for himself and his investors, I suppose, but I have a hard time believing what he's proposing is necessary to avoid some pending apocalypse for the gaming industry.
The best way to make money in the video game industry still appears to be to make a really good game, and sell it. Obviously "really good" is subjective, but it's why games like Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Assassin's Creed and others continue to be big moneymakers for their parent companies. And newcomers like Watch Dogs and The Last of Us show that you don't need to be an established series to sell well either.
But EA's problem has been their games. Not even that their games aren't good. It's that Battlefield premieres barely working at all. SimCity launches without an offline mode during a server meltdown. SWTOR has a massively bloated budget chasing a clearly waning MMO model. The problems here are both strategic and technical. Hell, I wrote an entire chapter about it in my book.
So no, I don't think the industry, or EA, is facing some looming crisis that can only be solved by free-to-play, DLC and microtransactions. First and foremost, reliability, quality and trust all have to be established to ensure consumers at the very least are delivered a working product. And second, this notion that consumers have asked for games to be broken down into bits and pieces like what happened with the music industry and CDs is the exact opposite of what's actually happened. While the parallels to say, the cable industry are obvious, it doesn't really transfer to gaming.
I respect EA's ability to try new things in terms of revenue streams, but when the end result is something like Dungeon Keeper, a formerly great game made free and stuffed full of paywalls and microtransactions, it's hard to say that's a good path to go down, either for consumers or EA themselves.
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