EA COO Peter Moore is counting on a dominating role for digital revenue in video games. Speaking at the Digital Entertainment World conference, he said that he expects the digital sales to completely eclipse retail numbers in the next two years.
He likened the rising prominence of downloads as a kind of “creative destruction,” in which an industry is unable to manage the evolving buying habits of its consumers. Moore compared the situation to the music business, that he says remains recovering from its shift away from relying totally on physical disc sales for revenue to a more download-centric model.
Moore relates that EA’s “customers” used to be retailers, but in the worldwide picture of the online atmosphere of the modern era, those “customers” are now the players. This has caused EA to triple its client service operations over the last 5 years. This has also affected the company’s marketing efforts. EA recently reported the Q3 earnings for its fiscal 2014. The famous games publisher suffered an overall net loss of $308 million during this quarter.