Discs are a ”great starting point” for digital business like MMOs he says. EA ”don’t think people want” streaming game services, just want them ”to work.”
”Do I believe longer term that the disc will go away? Not any time soon,” stated EA big cheese John Riccitiello. ”I think the disc can actually be a great starting point for a digital business, like an MMO, World of Warcraft, for instance.”
”Pushing that off to the side for a minute, we make services, we don’t make products, and I think the challenge I would have in answering the question the way you framed it is I don’t think people want a streaming game service,” he continued.
”I think they want their games to work. At times, that will be delivered best with streaming. At times, you should just download the game. For example, I think it’d pretty silly for us to stream Scrabble to you.”
”We’re talking about three minutes, you’ve downloaded the words perfectly, you can play with your friends, the tiles move back and forth… why would you want to pay for bandwidth for us to redraw a Scrabble board sixty times a second?”
”That’s just sort of bad math, if nothing else.” Ultimately it’s all down to what kind of Internet connection you have - streaming services like OnLive will suffer if you’ve got lousy broadband. What about those memorable PC LAN parties? Huh? HUH?!
”The point, though, that I’m making is that sometimes you’re not going to play because your internet connection is down and sometimes delivering a game by streaming is a really inefficient way to do it. I think the consumer, at least in my view, doesn’t care what the technology is, what lives behind the veiled curtain; they just want it to work.”
”I’ve yet to see - I haven’t played OnLive recently - but I don’t think you’d bring OnLive to a LAN party for first person shooters, because latency matters a lot in those circumstances. So, I think there’s different technologies for different purposes, and the consumer wants it to be largely invisible,” explained Riccitiello. Vive la disc!
