With the game "Star Wars", Electronic Arts Activision's face on his land

With the game "Star Wars", Electronic Arts Activision's face on his land

Multiplayer role playing world number two industry released Tuesday. The goal is to dethrone the "World of Warcraft."

Battle of the "blockbuster" of the game begins with a post on Tuesday "Star Wars the Old Republic", a new game from Electronic Arts (EA). After "Battlefield 3" is the second game of the U.S. take a position on the grass of Activision Blizzard (Vivendi), a world leader in this industry, thanks to "Call of Duty" and "World of Warcraft". Inspired by the story of the movie "Star Wars" George Lucas, multiplayer role-playing can, depending on specific sites, undermining the dominance of champions of the genre, "World of Warcraft," which in the seventh year of operation and brings together 10 million subscribers. This model provides game publishers with recurring revenues even if the game should continue to be developed to safeguard the interests of customers. So the CD of "Star Wars" has sold € 59, then the player must pay about 13 euros per month for progress in the game "Star Wars is the biggest production ever by Electronic Arts through our studio BioWare in partnership with LucasArts. Perfect for commercial launch, we check the quality of online services and server capacity during the test weekend in November with 750,000 volunteer players, "said Pascal Brochier, General Manager of EA France.

Electronic Arts is very excited about the new version of "Battlefield 3", a shooter (first person shooter) that is built on the same model as "Call of Duty." More than 8 million units sold since its launch on October 27. For comparison, the previous version was passed 11 million copies in two years. "In two games, we are a challenger from the industry leader, but it stimulates us. This is what happened in 2007 with a game of football we are collecting only 27% market share. Today we are at 80% with FIFA 12," says Pascal Brochier.

In recent years, world number two video games has halved catalog titles available to focus on more lucrative licenses. And especially to allocate resources for dematerialized games on mobile devices and social networks. This is reflected in the accounts: digital games are $ 1 billion in total turnover of 3.6 billion is estimated for the year ended March 2012.

Leader in mobile

In order to do this attack in the Digital Electronic Arts has paid some special Playfish studio in 2009 to $, 400 million provided expertise in games for social networks. EA has dropped the Sims series on Facebook, which attracted nearly 30 million social network users per month. In a free, this game is funded by micro-payments (to purchase accessories) and advertising. Mobile, Electronic Arts claimed the top spot, with a version of its flagship title and its subsidiary PopCap Games, a specialist in mobile phone games (Bejeweled, Plants of the Zombie) bought last July for $ 750 million.