EA recently announced a new subscription service that I quite like the idea of. For a measly $5 a month Xbox One users will gain access to a collection of EA games. As of now this line-up consists of Fifa 14, Madden NFL 25, Peggle 2 and Battlefield 4 with numerous other titles scheduled to hit the service over the coming months.
For a company that's earned themselves quite a nasty reputation when it comes to over charging and under delivering to consumers this is quite a surprising move. Whatsmore so is that it's actually quite brilliant looking when you consider the market these types of games attract.
And by that I mean the general audience. If your eyes are skirting over this sentence then its most probably not you. The general audience largely consists of 16-32 year old males in college/high-school with enough disposal income that they keep up with whatever console is currently in the market and buying a few games here and there.
A lot of these people generally only buy the yearly iterations of Call of Duty, their preferred sport titles (NFL, NHL, Fifa and what have you) and whatever title is generating the largest amount of buzz at that given moment (BioShock: Infinite, TitanFall and The Last of Us spring very heavily to mind when talking about this).
The general consumer, the one that keeps this industry going really isn't all that invested in what goes on it. The 3-5 titles they buy a year are enough to keep them content until their sequels hit shelves. Offering them a $5 subscription service that gives them access to all their preferred titles in one space for a fraction of the cost is a golden business strategy that's sure to entice a lot of these people.
When start to look at the yearly release schedule of titles like Fifa and how little changes in between each iteration of it, it starts to make even more sense. A lot of folks only but Fifa every three or four years seeing as their is so little changed in between sequels. Not only does EA access keep these costumers playing Fifa but it keeps the money in EAs pocket.
The problem invariably comes in when, inevitably the service starts locking previously freely available features behind this pay-wall to falsify a sense of value. We've seen already seen this start to happen as EA has locked the new Madden demo behind the EA Access subscription and even then users only gain a set amount of hours to fiddle around with it.
We saw a similiar thing happen to Xbox Live, where demos and other free features like the web browser and YouTube player all inevitably got stonewalled behind the Xbox Live Gold subscription. Features available literately everywhere else, for free being held for ransom just to squeeze $5 out of the consumer.
And quite frankly there isn't a company out there with as little consumer faith out there as EA. With the SimCity, Origin and BF4 sagas so fresh in everyone's minds its understandable that you'd be worried even about something that looks as good as EA Access.
Its bad enough that content is already being cut from games only to turned into pre-order bonuses and DLC packs, how long before we see even more content being cut from them and put behind subscription walls like these, if only to make them seem more valuable. Standard costumers not subscribing to this model but who still buy EA games can in fact become second class costumers to them.
Its a move that has me worried for the future of how publishers will approach the gaming business model. Content is already being sold to us piecemeal and if this service proves to be successful then you can bet your ass that every other major publisher will follow suit with there own service, until we reach a point where most content is locked behind more than one paywall.
Still though: to the average consumer EA access is a great deal. I can see a lot of folks subscribing to that and not buying any other games from there on out as all there bases are covered with this subscription. I really hope that this gets managed well enough so that it proves to be a thriving success.
