EA CEO calls CoD: Elite a “best-in-class” performance

It seems EA CEO John Riccitiello is impressed by Call of Duty: Elite, giving it the nod of approval during a recent investor call.

Riccitiello didn’t mention it specifically by name, but the implication was obvious. More interesting was this, “When we look at what we do and what our competitors do, there are a number of examples of [what] I would call the best work of our industry in terms of making this work,” which could possibly mean we’ll be seeing a rival service from EA sometime in the future.

Riccitiello got more specific, saying, “Frankly, I gave a compliment to one of our competitors. It’s got a subscription on the back end of an FPS title. I think that’s a best-in-class performance.

There are precedents for learning from rivals, he added. “We study all of these, and by way of example, when we put [FIFA] Ultimate Team out there, we had a competing idea with Madden, none of which I’m sure – none of whom I believe on the call would even know the name of it because it quickly faded and it was replaced with Ultimate Team because we’re learning from best practice.

“So the reason this is such a fast-growing revenue stream for us is we’re identifying and implementing best practice across the range of our products, and you’ll see lots more to come including an announcement near term that Peter just alluded to.”

The announcement alluded to most likely won’t be concerning a new service however, but rather EA’s plan to provide a constant stream of downloadable content releases for Battlefield 3 and other major franchises.

While EA does provide the Battlelog service which provides free stat-tracking and other features, finding a way to monetize something on the back-end like that as Activision has done is obviously very appealing.

Source: OXM