EA Embraces Digital Distribution

(Press Release - PC)

Chertsey, Surrey, UK -, Nov. 14, 2005 – Electronic Arts today announced the launch of online digital distribution that will deliver full games, demos, game trailers, and existing game updates to PC gamers worldwide.

"Digital distribution will keep content flowing to players, keeping their current EA games fresh and delivering new EA games quickly and conveniently," said Frank Sagnier, Vice President for Online at EA Europe. "We are always looking for ways to better connect with our customers, and EA is innovating to give our game-playing community access to exciting and immersive content."

Beginning today with Battlefield 2: Special ForcesTM, players can pre-buy and pre-download the game using a desktop application designed for convenience and ease of use. Then, on the Battlefield 2: Special Forces launch day (Nov. 22 in North America and Nov. 25 in Europe), Battlefield fans will be ready to play.*

Full article at:

http://www.armchairempire.com/videogame-news/PC-Games/November-2005/ea-embraces-digital-distribution.htm


Looks like EA joining the Steam bandwaggon. Wonder what this means for independent developers once the whole industry moves to digital distro. I believe this was one of Bill Gates recent reasons for not requiring Blue Ray and other mass storage media in the not too distant future.

Well, if you consider bloated EA-crap "competition", we're in for some trouble!

I hope this new action bankrupts the company.

Well, now that I have broadband I don't mind so much about this sort of thing.

When I bought HL2, it took 7 hours for me to be up and running with it and I was very traumatised by the experience - mainly due to the fact that some people said they were up and running in a few minutes whilst another hour ticked by.

If their desktop application is ACTUALLY designed for convenience, they have one up on Steam.

Anything thats mass market and heavily marketed and sells well and looks better than our stuff is competition. Marketing sells games better than anything else, and thats generaly what small amateur independent developers are bad at.

I for one always hate marketing and just want to make games. Problem is so does everyone else I work with. And it seems to hold true with most developers I am in contact with.

if I can make an archive copy of it... And reinstall whenever I want... And it doesn't lock to my one piece of hardware so I can't install it on my laptop too... And it doesn't try to call the mothership every time I want to play it... I'm ok with it.

But I have a feeling that SOMEWHERE along the line it's gonna fall on it's face with the restrictions I've placed on it. :)

Oh... and there's steam clients floating around out there that break their goofy little hold on your software you purchased legally too. And I'm damn glad to see them. Even though I don't play ANYTHING that gets distro'd by steam.

Same here (and now EA I suppose, no huge deal there though)... I have a feeling that in the future that will seriously limit our choices, though...

yeah I decided to not bother with steam too. Looks like valve did ok despite all the bad feeling towards their system.

I doubt I'll be buying any games from EA soon either. They don't pander to my tastes at all really, and keep tossing useless music that puts me off their games before I even start playing the games themselves.

Maybe its a sign of getting old, but when I play an EA game, I always feel they lost the plot and are targeting a different market.

I did quite like the Fight Night games, but as far as mainstream big name publishers go. I find that Ubisoft seem to know what they are doing most of the time.

It's funny what personal taste does for you... I don't think I've ever been interested in an Ubisoft game =] While EA has The Sims, Black and White and Command and Conquer franchises, so they keep me relatively happy.


Just goes to prove if you have big IP you can get away with murder.

Steams okay, you get used to it. It has not really caused me many problems (quickly looks around for something made of wood).

My advice is try it, and get used to the concept, it won´t be going away in a looooong time :/

I'm one of those 'don't knock it til you've tried it' ijits, but I really don't want to give Valve my money for something I'm silently protesting against, just so I can say I don't like it. Because by then they'll have my money and they don't need to listen.

Not that they need to listen now anyway, because of all the people like you =]

I think this will be a good thing in the long run, although there will be a lot of problems until one unified distribution system is implemented.

Speak for yourself. I am not out to compete with EA. The games EA puts out and the direction I'm taking are pretty different.

Incidentally, you make this point yourself later when you said





Whoa whoa whoa, are you saying that you think digital distribution of games should be consolidated into one distributor? Because if so, I strongly disagree.

No, not one distributor. I think a bunch of Steam-like software distribution systems will come out that give you everything you need to create a server and validate users.

I'm leery of the whole thing - smells like a loss of consumer choice and control to me.

Seems to me that advertisers are starting to wake up to games as a great way to reach the youth market, but there's an obstacle. After buying a game, a gamer may have only limited contact with the game's publisher (download a patch, post a forum message or two), and that's a problem. Advertisers want to be able to feed a gamer advertising and also gather information on consuming habits.

So I reckon digital delivery services will slowly start to make it more and more difficult to just buy a game, register it once and then play it offline thereafter. Likely you'll receive a time based 'licence to play' which will require you to re-register after a period of time. It'll be touted as convenient, free and when you do so you'll recieve new content etc.. but you'll also be required to download in-game advertising and upload personal consumer information before you'll be allowed to play again.

I wouldn't mind that, what I would mind though is having 50+ stinking "Steam-clone"-clients installed on my system.

Each distributor will probably have their own "Steam" program. They already put all their games together in an "EA Games" folder, just so you can have all your "EA Products" together, in case you forget who made them.

Everything's going to be all download soon. The other thing is that I don't think it really matters if EA is competing in our space or not. I think what matters is if games are good they'll sell well. Marketing too makes a difference but that can be solved. It still comes down to making killer games. Word of mouth is then your best marketing.

Yeah, of course the entire industry is going to all go digital. That’s why it's going to be that much harder to compete without your own dedicated marketing guy.

The net will be saturated with the gaming equivalent of gaming porn. Whether your game is excellent or not will matter of course—just as it does now—but no matter how excellent your game is, if people don’t know about it, they are less likely to buy it. And if their eyes glaze over from a surfeit of commercials about 20 types of “your” game (all with different graphics, if nothing else) they might not have the patience to listen to the word of mouth about that 21st game. No matter how excellent.

But it’s not all bad. Because I think the field will have ever more need of versatile and talented professionals who know the Indie market. Because although many of the self-start ups may go down (because they don't have the budgets to compete with AAA games if nothing else) many others will take their place. That will make the Indie gaming field, as a whole, more of a career and less of a “let’s slap something together in a garage on a shoestring budget” kind of things. In other words, although small companies might go down, the people who are those small companies will have a much better chance of becoming professionals.

It's been happening for several years now. Just really slowly, but events like IGF show how much more commercial indie games are becoming. More time and bigger budgets. I think for most people game development is going to get a lot more difficult to succeed at.

Xbox360 is a breath of fresh air in some ways, as it opens a new avenue for independent developers to succeed, but there aren’t many 3rd party solutions available to those that don't have the skills to port their own tools. And those tools that are there are too expensive for even fairly successful indies to be able to license.

I expect things will become a lot more like cable TV, and far more commercial with the indie scene of today falling further into obscurity.

It is. Just not the customers.

What's the last game you bought rom EA anyway? Last game I bought was "Earth & Beyond", which promptly cured me of ever wanting to buy another EA title.

Seriously, if it hadn't been for the US sports franchise and "The Sims" EA would have gone bankrupt ages ago.

You'd have to. Because the opposite is too much like communism. The only alternative is if someone released a standard, opensource program everyone could use that offered everything Steam et al does, but without the propriety tie-in. And I think we'll see world wide communism happen sooner than the commercial embrace of open source software.

And yet every day we see so much evidence to the contrary. Excellent games like Sacrifice getting beaten by faux-games like "Who wants to be a millionaire" and "DOOM 3".

Marketing is the only thing that makes a difference. You can take a game like F.E.A.R. for instance, that's doesn't even WORK out-of-the-box, and still sell it by the bucketload, because of all the hype about it.

Thinking about it, CableTV is probably the perfect metaphor for gaming of the future.

Indie is gonna be dead, make your bucks and get out while you still can.

EA suck, it's that simple. Now their crappy games will be downloaded like warez.

> When I bought HL2, it took 7 hours for me to be up
> and running with it and I was very traumatised
> by the experience

I still wonder why anyone buys or bothers with PC games of that cablibre. Just use a console.

It's not going to be dead. Well, to rephrase, it'll be the equivalent of community television. Hmm, I'm not winning here am I...

I think proclaiming the Indie gaming dead is a little premature. It just needs to adapt to the new situation.

If X market is saturated, find a new market. (Hence why I'm a great fan of BlitzMax being multiplatform.) Unfortunatly user mods do tend to be hard to find with this aproch (oh, what I would give for a simple 3D engine for the Mac with 3ds import, working move and point commands), but it is still posible to create an Escape Velocity like effect in the mac market IMHO and worth the hassle.

If you don't want to change market, then a change of tack is required. A good example being a great many of the published Blitz3D games. Can't get AAA graphics? Then get around them. Cartoon-like-graphics don't age nearly as quickly as real life photo realistic l33t w00t stuff, or better yet, forge your own style i.e. Platypus, those graphics will not age for an age.

While marketing is a right royal pain in the backside for indie games, I'm sure that "indie lables" could still get a good toe hold.

The end isn't nie for indie gaming, its just a mutation.

That's the exact opposite of the truth. Especially when
you consider the topic of this thread. And that is that the
games industry is starting to take steps to reduce
production costs and therefore, risk.

That's important!

If this really takes off, publishers that were originally very
risk-averse(and which of them isn't) will actually release
games that might have been too risky before.(read:
creative games, the things we make)

And that means people like us have more of a chance
(though it's still a small one) at getting our stuff distributed
by a sizeable publisher! (Or any publisher)

I see a bright future for indie gaming.

Found out some interesting Torque pricing that wasn't made public on the community boards. But for next gen, games are going to be pretty expensive. Prohibitive for most. I have often worried that GG want to be an Indie EA and the article makes me wonder all the more.

TSE

$25,000 per game early adopters, $50,000 when the shader engine is finaly launched (for commercial games).

and XBOX360 port of your TSE game $10,000 per title


http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1571&Itemid=2


Must say I'm pretty disappointed with the 360 pricing when MS are giving out dev kits for free to developers who's games they like.

That GG is angling to be the "indie EA" (way to coin a phrase!) is how things always kind of looked. At least they're supportive of indies though, as opposed to all the publishers trying to be the actual EA.

GarageGames gave me a free license, and offered to help with some technical info, so I can integrate it with 3D World Studio, even though they are coming out with their own editor, "Constructor". I really can't say anything bad about them.

Don't you mean the new Sierra? GG just want their old jobs back. Can't really blame them for that.

heh, not knocking them too hard, I'm using their engine and have a really good B3D loader for torque too.






I like Sierra less than EA though. They have a tendency to close studio's without telling their developers.

Might have been Dynamix even, who turned up one morning to find the doors locked and a message on the door informing empolyees they were laid off and could expect a check in the post.

Why can't I read the name 'Chertsey' without hearing it said in an Ali G accent!? :P