Continuing our interview with EA CEO John Riccitiello, in which he stated that digital would overtake retail this year, the executive makes it clear that physical game discs will be an important part of the business for a long time to come despite the rise in digital gaming. We specifically asked Riccitiello if everything would be headed towards a sort of cloud-based service, but he rejected the idea of all games going completely digital in the near future.
"Do I believe longer term that the disc will go away? Not any time soon," he said. "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. 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."
He continued, "So, my guess is that when you think about all the ways you can play a game: you can have the entire client locally, operated on by a local CPU; you could abstract the game virtually, through a browser, have your local CPU operating on a game that is remote; you can have part of the game on a server, part locally, as you do with an MMO; you can play entirely through a browser where the CPU that matters is actually on the server and all you’re doing is using your local PC to display it; or, you could have the entire thing resolved including the display which [is how OnLive handles it]."
"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."
