EA Sports online games exclusive to Sony

[CreatureX]

Taken from the Monday print edition of The Wall Street Journal:

Videogame Giant Links With Sony, Snubbing Microsoft
By Robert A. Guth

Electronic Arts Inc. became the king of videogames with the likes of Tiger Woods and John Madden. Now it's using these allies to challenge the king of software: Microsoft Corp.

The next great battleground for the $27 billion videogame industry is online games -- and there, Electronic Arts is about to throw is considerable weight behind Sony Corp.. Tomorrow (13 May 2003), it plans to announce that when it takes the long-awaited step of putting its biggest blockbuster sports games online, they will be only in versions for Sony game machines.

The exclusive deal shuts out rival game-machine makers from access to the popular EA Sports line in it's new online form.

ŠThe Wall Street Journal

[gcribbs]

not surprising. The PS2 has a huge marketshare lead and of those who own the XBox many also own a PS2. The percentage of the market that only owns the XBox is very small.

They only piss off a small group and they stick it to Microsoft and the control MS wants to have over online gaming thru their Live network.

[joshd2012]

The main reason is that EA does like MS's online strategy at all. It is funny because in an interview posted over at IGN, one of the MS guys says that Sony is going to announce that they are going to start a program like MS's X-Box Live thing. But this just shows that EA is going with Sony because it looks nothing like Live. Those MS people sure know how to talk ****. I'm awaiting EA's announcement if they are going to keep the service free or start charging.

[s}{ammer]

one of the links posted yesterday had EA saying that MS also wasn't willing to pay them enough. This is probably the real reason the games aren't on live. One one hand, I like seeing someone else muscle MS around. On the other hand, as an xbox owner I hate this because I don't play the PS2 anymore. It's in the kids bedroom and they get to play it.

[PixyJunket]

I don't see how this figures as EA "sticking it" to Microsoft. Unless Sony gave them some huge ass wad of bling, they're only hurting themselves by being the only non-online sports library on the Xbox.

[gcribbs]

Originally posted by pixyboi
I don't see how this figures as EA "sticking it" to Microsoft. Unless Sony gave them some huge ass wad of bling, they're only hurting themselves by being the only non-online sports library on the Xbox.

not really since their games are tops or near the tops in sales- so they obviously looked at demographics and saw that the percentage of Xbox owners who did not own a PS2 was so small that they could afford to not release online games on the XBox.

Also even with the huge success of Live they have 500,000 subscribers out of what 5,000,000 owners of the XBox so this is 10% of the owners who even have Live.

How many of those 500,000 only have an Xbox anyway-

5,000
50,000

hardly a drop in the bucket when they can market to the remaining 4,950,000 owners of the Xbox with no effect on sales.

Trust me EA crunched these numbers and made this decision.

[Cusm]

But I now refuse to buy Madden and NCAA. I will stick with Sega or MS for these. I prefer EA over these, but I want online play. I have the PS2 adapter, but I hated the Madden online format, and all the cheesy cheaters it has and allows.

I might change my mind if it has online franchising.

[Josh H]

EA sales most of their games on the PS2 anyway, so they're not concerned about losing X-box or GC sales by not doing online in those ports.

[TaTTooD]

Originally posted by Cusm

I might change my mind if it has online franchising.


its not gonna have it this year. your best bet would be to find a league to play in.