A cracking Christmas?
"We've hosted over a billion online games. A billion online games. That's a staggering number," boasted Riccitiello which said online games sales dwarfed even the takings of Hollywood blockbuster movies. "I mean, it's the productivity of a small nation wrapped up in just EA Sports online."
Online gaming, Riccitiello explained, "fosters a different level of engagement" and has also spawned new business models for the industry like "play first, pay later," which gets people hooked before asking for incremental amounts of cash to get further in the game.
Playfish, a company recently acquired by EA, uses this model rather successfully on Facebook.
But despite saying there were "a lot of good, positive indicators out there," Riccitiello said it was "still a little too early to call Christmas, seeing as we're still in the first week of December."
We suppose we'll just have to wait through the coming weeks to tell whether EA has been naughty or nice this year.
