EA Aren't Giving Up On PCs, Pessimism

News by John Walker Contributor

Published on May 14, 2008

John Riccitiello, the big boss at EA, has taken a pretty negative view of PC boxed sales. Kotaku quote him saying,

"Were it not for The Sims and the WoW box sales, it'd be a pretty dismal sector."

Which implies a lack of confidence in their own boxed copies of various Valve games, and indeed everything else non-Sims EA sell on PC, and indeed the new games they've announced for the summer. However, hope is not lost, he says, in the form of casual games... Oh for goodness sakes. It's like a recession. If everyone tells themselves there's going to be a recession, spending slows, people behave like a recession's coming, and we have a recession. The PC games industry is talking itself out of existence.

Anyhow, he goes on to say,

"The fastest growing [sector] is subscription, microtransactions-based and casual games, many of which are pretty much centered on the PC. One of the things we try to look at at EA is the total business represented on PC game software, and we're seeing a growth in business there. It's been growing for several years... it's categorized wrongly by looking simply at the box side of the equation."

Good luck to Sims 3 and Spore then. And Dead Space. And Left4Dead-in-a-box. And Mass Effect. And Mercenaries 2. And Burnout Paridise. And Mirror's Edge. And Warhammer Online... Oh, we're not bitter.

You can read far more of Riccitiello's quotes on Kotaku here.

Also, this is all as nothing when compared to DigitalBattle's claim yesterday that,