EA Sports = WWE Network?
By Scott Keith on 2 August 2014
Reading about the new EA Sports online vault gaming thing (I'm not a big gamer… my PS3 has basically become an outlet to watch the WWE Network), but this new business model for gaming seems to be the same as the new model for the WWE Network. Instead of one $60 purchase for a game you'll enjoy for a fixed amount of time, for a far smaller monthly fee you get access to a bunch, whenever you want. I don't know much about the margins for games, but the $4.99 probably all goes straight to EA, instead of the $60 split up the supply chain (retailers, etc) and they don't have to worry about the lost revenue of the game on the secondary market.
Yeah, a nice side effect of that was Target dropping all their Xbox One EA games to $10 yesterday up here thus finally allowing me to start building a game library for the system.
It's an interesting idea, and I certainly enjoy PS Plus on my PS3 right now, but there's just not a lot of games for XBone to even entice me with. Plus it feels like the game selection is the stuff that drops to $2 in the EBGames bargain bin. Last year's Madden! The Battlefield game no one really cared for! They need a better premium hook besides "play these games without a disc." Maybe I'm just old and crotchety, I dunno.