But EA is not looking at VR just yet
There are 60 million PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles out in the wild, according to EA’s CFO Blake Jorgensen.
That’s five million more than his estimate of 55 million given at the end of last year.
Talking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference (via Gamespot), during a presentation about Virtual Reality, Jorgensen explained that EA wasn’t jumping on the VR bandwagon as the tech was still unproven.
Until demand for VR grows to rival the “large” console market (that’s 60 million current-gen consoles and 150 million+ last-gen units), EA would not consider investing the $50-$100 million needed to build a full VR game, even though it had consolidated its game engine and development processes to streamline production.
That said, he did suggest that the publisher was working on smaller “vignette” VR games, but did not expand on what these were.
He did, however, confirm that despite some variance by bandwidth speeds and where people are in the world, 25 percent of EA sales are now full-game downloads, up from 20 percent disclosed by the company last November.
“We want the consumer to decide,” said Jorgensen. “We have great retailer partners; we want to continue to maintain those great retail partners. And they perform a lot of discovery and marketing services for us. We believe there is a world where the retail partners are always going to be around.”
“But also a lot of consumers, just like music and books and movies and TV have adopted the way to download digitally is ultimately the way of the future. We try to make sure we’re available in any place where people want to buy and consume games.”
What do you think, fair reader?
