This blog is a reply to EA’s official blog:
http://www.ea.com/ca/news/e3-2013-ea-conference-recap
Electronic Arts Inc. is a leading global interactive entertainment software company. EA develops, publishes, and distributes interactive software worldwide for Internet-connected consoles, personal computers, mobile phones, tablets and social networks. In terms of EA’s products, we can see they emphasize on both products breadth and depth. In their recent conference, they announced the releases and progresses of a variety of games.
For breadth, EA started with a few military strategy games as far as I can recall. Now EA has video games in many different areas like sports, first role shooting and social lives. EA has been closely incorporating with a lot of dominate sport leagues such as NBA, NFL, NHL to design various sport games for the fans who obsess in these sports and the players. EA has also expanded into first role shooting games. EA’s wartime strategy games are great but for the first role shooting games; it is a totally different view of the battlefield which is super engaging. The most successful game they have ever created would be The Sims series. The reason is it is a game about a person’s daily life in a simulated world. The character goes to school, work, dates and everything in real life. The Sims series made a record about over 100 million sales in the history of video games (Brendan Sinclair, 2010)
While keep developing into new types of games, EA also focuses on bettering their existing games. For their original strategy games like Command and Conquer, Red Alert and Generals, they creatively implemented a story line in each series while making newer versions from these series. By doing this, they can attain and retain loyalty from many customers and many consumers such as me who are easily addicted by these attractive games and always expecting the next one. Every year, EA will come up with sport games for the upcoming sport seasons like this year’s FIFA 14. The graphics gets better each time and the sport games getting more and more like the real games so customers can surely enjoy and watch their favorite sport at home. As the technologies advance nowadays, video games only have relatively shorter lives before they become out of date. However, this is not a problem for EA!
FIFA 14 which is coming out this year, it has improved a lot in many aspects compare to FIFA 13:
I believe EA’s product breadth and depth are one of the best combinations in the world. By differentiate products like this and define clear positions for them will not only help to attract more customers but also attain their long term loyalties. Looking into the future, EA is also considering about making games from some famous movies like star wars and moving into the tablets sector at the same time. These moves will also help in targeting new segments and creating new markets for EA.
Reference:
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-sims-turns-10-tops-125-million-units/1100-6249485/