EA's chief executive officer, John Riccitiello, said he believes the emerging online and mobile phone-based gaming business models will overtake traditional boxed products for video game consoles in the next year.
In an interview with Reuters, Riccitiello said: "When people think of games they traditionally think of the Xbox, the PlayStation and the Wii, and they forget about all these online services that are out there – subscription, microstransactions, games they find on Facebook or if they go to Pogo.
Video game publisher Electronic Arts predicts the rise of online and mobile gaming in 2010.
"If you add all that stuff up, it's almost half of the industry now. It's about 40 to 45 per cent. Next year it's likely to be a larger share of the total industry and it'll be bigger than the console games all put together."
Riccitiello's sentiments explain EA's acquisition in November of the social network game developer Playfish for $275 million. The EA chief executive also said the publisher plans to reduce the number of boxed games it releases next year. EA released around 50 video games sold in boxed format in 2009 but plans to cut that number to 40, and Riccitiello said that number could be reduced even further.
"Thirty wouldn't shock me at some point in the future," Riccitiello told an audience at the Reuters Global Media Summit in New York.
"We're the world's leader in packaged goods games, we make more of them than anybody. We're not suggesting that business is going away ... [but] there's this other thing that's growing," he said.
"It's our goal for that [online] business to be as important as, and over time maybe more important than, our packaged goods business."
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