Call of Duty Elite: EA Hoping to Get 'One Step Ahead'Call of Duty Elite, Activision's social service with a subscription element has been doing well for the company, and EA has taken notice. On EA's last earnings call CEO John Riccitiello praised Elite, and today at a special New York showcase for EA's titles, EA COO Peter Moore talked with IndustryGamers about the shooter market.
Battlefield 3 is already well over 10 million sold, and Moore revealed that EA's first-person shooter market share in 2011 climbed 11% to a total of 24%, but EA knows it can do an even better job of monetizing Battlefield and other shooters. Perhaps an Elite-like service is in the wings for Battlefield? Moore was non-committal but he did say it's "incumbent upon" EA to do something or better yet to get "one step ahead" of Activision.
"I think certainly you look at what our competitors do well, and certainly Call of Duty Elite... the numbers Activision have talked about, they've done a great job," he observed. "It's incumbent upon us, whether we do that or do something one step ahead, I think the digital strategy that we're executing against right now - a billion dollars on a trailing 12-month basis - shows that we're doing some good things as well. Differently, maybe. FIFA Ultimate Team could be as big as Call of Duty Elite alone - one mode in one game could be as big as that. I'm pretty confident - we announced over $100 million in that mode last year and I'd be stunned if we didn't do better than that this year at the run rate we're currently at.
He continued, "So yeah, we're doing good things, they're doing good things. I think, to their credit, one thing they did very well from the get go was get retail involved with point-of-sale cards, selling it when consumers may be most open to buying it, which is the moment they buy the game. So hats off to them."
While EA would love to take back the shooter crown from Call of Duty, the publisher is at least satisfied that the market for the genre continues to just get bigger.
"I think both Activision and ourselves would love to grow that market so that the addressable market is even larger. I don't know what it is...but it could be as much as a quarter of the entire industry. If you add in digital, it very well could be in the future. It's good for the industry to continue to grow that," Moore added. "These are big games that are bigger than the industry themselves - they're cultural phenomenons and it was very difficult to escape, even if you weren't a gamer, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 this past Fall. They're big entertainment blockbusters - not just video game blockbusters - and that's very important for the industry. It's the same as in the old days with Microsoft, Halo was a big deal, bigger than video games. So that element of it, with massive launches that compete favorably with movies, is good for us."
