Today in Singapore EA announced what is one of the first steps in the globalization of the EA Sports brand name. They have announced the launch of Fifa Online in 10 countries with more to be added.
The talk about a freemium future isn’t exactly new, with more and more high-profile studios showing their love for the hugely popular business model, one which everyone wants to take a piece of the pie from. Now, Electronic Arts just confirmed that they see free-to-play not only as an alternative to the usual retail model, but probably as the segment with the most potential for the publisher.
DSOGaming writes: "Seems that it was no surprise that Crytek revealed their F2P plans for all their future titles. After all, Crytek is an EA partner and from what we’ve heard, Electronic Arts is currently quite happy with the F2P model. EA’s Andrew Wilson revealed that the Korean F2P version of FIFA is currently earning 100 million dollars per year."
Yeah from all the stolen money on Xbox Live accounts last October, just kidding, I know that is not related at all. Even though it could be the case that EA are looking at all of the Fifa franchise, not just the F2P version, which means that my first sentence IS the reason they made a killing.
With great power comes great responsibility and that is also true to the studios behind some ambitious free-to-play games. However, sometimes the ambition is just too much and some promising games fail before the dust even settles down. Or there was some miscalculation along the way and players didn’t correspond as expected. Whatever the reason, some games didn’t stay long with us.
I'm going to go ahead and call the company that actually managed to delete all characters and game data from it's server by mistake the biggest 'blunder' in MMO history, much less this year.
It was a game with no English release, so we never heard of it over here.
