During Electronic Arts’ financial conference call for investors and analysts, chief executive officer Andrew Wilson and chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen talked about the partnership between EA Play and Xbox Game Pass and what they see coming for the next generation of consoles.
Wilson mentioned that the objective is to make sure that players can access EA play on any platform in any way that makes sense.
He added that EA has a strong partnership with Microsoft, Sony, and Steam, and they saw an opportunity to build an access point to the EA plat subscription on Microsoft’s platform.
According to Wilson, we’ll continue to see EA working to making the subscription available on any platform.
Jorgensen added that while he can’t give details on the economics of the deal with Microsoft, it obviously has a positive economic impact for EA.
“The real goal is how do we grow our subscription and also help Microsoft grow their subscription. This is a great partnership with them.
We’re in the very early days of the industry for subscription and we’re doing everything possible to help consumers understand why it’s a great potential for them to either be introduced to new games, play the games they love, or play games for a great value.
He added that EA doesn’t do anything for free, and together with Microsoft they have figured out a day to make the economics work for both. “
Speaking of free next-gen upgrades for the games, Jorgensen mentioned that in the past people have delayed purchases of titles to wait for the next-generation version.
According to Jorgensen, there will be 8-12 million next-gen consoles between now and the end of March and people will upgrade otherwise. Upgrades are being granted to let people be comfortable with buying the current-gen version for games knowing that they will be able to upgrade without any problems.
EA knows that it’ll take time for the installed base of the new consoles to grow, but it’ll bring “incredible opportunities” for the publisher to build better and better games due to the additional power.
“Where it gets really really exciting a year or two years from now because I will tell you, games are going to be unbelievable when you start to see them a year or two year from now on the new consoles.”
Jorgensen was also asked to comment on the possibility of increasing the price of next-gen games, but he clarified that EA has not decided yet.
“I don’t really want to weigh-in on that yet. We have always said games are getting more expensive. The experience is getting deeper. The time that people are playing games is getting longer.
One might argue that that might require a higher price point over time, but we’ll address that as we get closer to more games coming into the next-gen console transition.
What I default to is, let’s stay focused on what we can do with the games on the new consoles and the excitement, and price will follow that. We’ll figure that out.
I don’t want people to read into that we are going to raise prices or not. We don’t know yet. What we do know is that we’re going to be able to do a lot more things with the new consoles and our partnerships with the new console… You know, Sony and Microsoft, and others that are making the consoles.”
If you want to learn more about the latest financial results from Electronic Arts you can check out our dedicated article.
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