EA Mobile mulling gaming subscription service

By Jason Ankeny

EA Mobile said it is giving serious consideration to launching a mobile game subscription service in Europe. According to PocketGamer.biz, EA Mobile's European vice president of publishing Javier Ferreira floated the subscription concept Monday during an EA Mobile roundtable in London: "The kind of subscription we are thinking about is that you'd subscribe to an EA channel, and you can download five games a month maybe, and the price for that might be similar to what you'd pay per download now," Ferreira said. "We think we've got to broaden the business models that we're offering to consumers, to encourage more usage, and new users."

Although EA Mobile currently releases two or three new games each month in Europe, Ferreira said the firm will not attempt to step up production to compete with rivals like Gameloft, which reportedly plans to release as many as 80 titles this year alone. "We are very far from trying to release 80 games," he said. "We want to focus our R&D expenditure on some of the more innovative things that are going to drive the market forward, rather than making what might be the same game with different brands on top. That's not doing much for the market... There are too many games in the market, and from a consumer perspective I don't think there's a need for so many games out there. It might be a sensible strategy from a revenue perspective, but I don't think it's necessarily a sensible strategy from a consumer perspective. Our focus has been on launching hits. We are focused on quality over volume."