EA CEO: PC gaming is fastest growing platform

According to the CEO of Electronic Arts, the fastest growing platform for gaming right now is the PC. According to the CEO, the growth is not due to direct sales, but to subscriptions, microtransactions and downloads. Free-to-play would also be lucrative.

The idea is that the PC games market is suffering from competition from consoles and tablets and from piracy. This idea was fueled by unsatisfactory sales figures for PC games by research firms. However, according to EA CEO John Riccitiello, those numbers are not representative and exclude growing segments of the PC market.

“The fastest growing video game platform is the PC,” the CEO even said in a statement interview with CNBC, “but it’s growing through subscriptions, microtransactions and downloads.” According to him, this is in stark contrast to the picture that has been painted in recent years, that the market for PC games has been declining rapidly. Publishers like EA are growing because they have found other ways to bring content to consumers, according to Riccitiello. The switch to free-to-play would also generate a lot of income. Last month, EA announced that all future titles will be playable for free.

Earlier, Nvidia called on the basis of studies that the turnover from PC gaming in 2014 will exceed that of consoles again. One of the reasons is that the current generation of consoles is on its last legs, while the video chips for PCs are further developed. Nvidia pointed out that the GeForce GTX 580 is nine times more powerful than the xenoschip from the Xbox 360. Intel has also made considerable progress with the integrated GPUs of its processors so that they can run the popular titles from Blizzard, for example, and AMD provides its APUs with even more graphical processing power. This year and next year, however, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are releasing new generations of their consoles.