If I were the CFO of Electronic Arts I would have thought twice about giving a speech at the UBS Global Technology Conference explaining how I was planning to get even more money out of gamers, but apparently Blake Jorgensen, chief financial officer for EA, hasn’t been paying attention to the internet the past few days.

“If you have a live service component to [games on EA Access and Origins Access], you can have a subscription that’s uncapped,” he said. “Give people a way to spend money on things they want to do and that they enjoy doing vs simply capping them at $9 or $10 per month and that’s all they can ever spend.We find people play twice as many games, they spend twice as long on them, and they spend twice as much money, because you’ve reduced the cost of trial to close to zero.”

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What that means in non-business talk is that EA like the idea of a subscription service for games, like EA Access, and those games have micro-transactions built in so the player thinks “I didn’t spend £60 on the game it’s part of my subscription, I might as well splooge some cash on some DLC.”

“Maybe they went into the subscription to play Star Wars, they try Madden, they find out they like the game, like playing Madden Ultimate Team, and then may spend money on Ultimate Team,” he adds.

Blake goes on to explain that he’d love to go back to Battlefield 4 and turn that in to a ‘live’ service and make some more cash from it. It also sounds like so Bioware’s Anthem and the Motive’s Star Wars game will include live services so will probably have lots of lovely loot boxes for you to buy.

EA have already said they may move away from yearly releases for Madden and FIFA and turn them in to a subscription service.

“For us, trying to move the business to more live services, grow our subscription part of the business, is trying to build a much more steady business. I’m very comfortable with a steady growth rate, and with digital that continues to become a bigger part of our business and continues to expand the profitability of the business,” says Blake.

Take Two have also been openly discussing “recurrent consumer spending”” as a key source of revenue, Activision and other studios have yet to make any comments, or at least if they have, they have had the sense to do it quietly behind close doors and not discussed the “uncapped” monetisation of players quite so bluntly.

Source: GI.Biz