Article: Digital vs. Retail: Five big publishers

[zarx]

Slimebeast said:

milkyjoe said:

Slimebeast said:
Activision's revenue from digital I can understand because of how big WoW is, but EA I don't understand. KOTOR online is not that big.

EA offer a lot of DLC in their annual sports games like Tiger Woods/FIFA, and they publish Rock Band, which obviously has a hell of a lot of DLC.

But DLC is still tiny. DLC is only a fraction of the main game's price and not even all EA games have DLC. As a comparison you have lots of DLC from Take Two (Borderlands, LA Noire, Red Dead, GTA4, Bioshock 2) and Ubisoft  and yet their income from digital is tiny (around 10%). So what explains EA's high income from digital download? Facebook games?

EA also has Origin, PopCap, and their Play4Free devision http://www.play4free.com/. Then they have their other browser/social games and their mobile games, things like the iOS Dead Space game etc. And they have a lot of DLC and microtransaction stuff in their sports games, they even have microtransactions in Mass Effect 3 where you could by guns for multiplayer. They also publish a lot of XBLA, PSN, Steam games like Shank 2, Warp, deathspank etc.

It all adds up, TOR isn't even their only MMO they have Warhammer and I belive Dark Age of Camalot is still running as well.