Posted on Monday, March 22 2010 @ 21:35 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter had a meeting with EA and heard the game publisher is planning a strategy that will involve selling "premium downloadable content" before a game's release. Basically, the idea is to sell 3 to 4 hours of beta/demo gameplay for $10 or $15.
Pachter separately told Gamasutra in an email, "I think that the plan is to release PDLC at $15 that has 3-4 hours of gameplay, so [it has] a very high perceived value, then [EA will] take the feedback from the community (press and players) to tweak the follow-on full game that will be released at a normal packaged price point."
"If DICE were able to follow Battlefield 1943 with a full-blown European WWII campaign game a few months later, it would have been a wild success," Pachter said.
He continued, "EA’s view is that the PDLC costs a lot less to develop (essentially, it’s the first few levels of the full-blown game), and they have the opportunity to fix whatever needs to be fixed in the packaged product that is released a few months later, whether that entails doing more of what people like or doing less of what they don’t like. It sounds like a brilliant strategy to me." Gamasutra has contacted EA for further clarification about the new strategy.
More info
at Gamasutra.
