Come on Mr Riccitiello! Make up your mind! On Monday we reported your claim that digital would be “bigger than the packaged goods business” in 2011 – now you’re trying to tell us that game discs are here to stay? Do you have some sort of Twilight Zone split personality or something?
In part two of James Brightman’s interview with EA CEO John Riccitiello at Industry Gamers, he goes into detail about how he feels about cloud gaming.
“Do I believe longer term that the disc will go away?” He begins, “Not any time soon. I think the disc can actually be a great starting point for a digital business, like an MMO, World of Warcraft, for instance.
“Pushing that off to the side for a minute, we make services, we don’t make products, and I think the challenge I would have in answering the question the way you framed it is I don’t think people want a streaming game service. I think they want their games to work. At times, that will be delivered best with streaming. At times, you should just download the game. For example, I think it’d pretty silly for us to stream Scrabble to you. We’re talking about three minutes, you’ve downloaded the words perfectly, you can play with your friends, the tiles move back and forth… why would you want to pay for bandwidth for us to redraw a Scrabble board sixty times a second? That’s just sort of bad math, if nothing else.”
We can see his point – and we actually agree. Cloud gaming is a great concept, but gaming needs to be driven by pragmatic solutions that work with the tech we are using today – not the tech we’ll be using 5-10 years down the track. We have no doubt that Cloud Gaming, and media-less consoles, are the future – but the near-future? That’s what’s up for debate.
EA CEO: Game Discs Not Going Away Any Time Soon [Industry Gamers]
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