Electronic Arts' CEO John Riccitiello has been explaining how difficult it is to get its new online Pay-Wall/Pass in process. It's very hard indeed.
"The honest truth is we've been preparing for this for the better part of 18 months. Our first step was with what we did with NBA Live about a year and a half ago when we had the Live season data. And the first time we put something behind a coupon code is we had first in the industry.
"We had to build our infrastructure. We had to get what we called our nucleus registration database into a bullet-proof position so we knew we could manage intelligence and entitlements without leaving the consumer sort of left holding the bag where we make mistakes. We've now got more than 60 million people that have registered on that database, and we're managing entitlements from it. But it took us a while to build. It may seem simple, but the underlying database structure and architecture to support it was not simple. But we're now in a position to be able to do it across the full range of titles from Electronic Arts."
Useful to know. Less useful to the person who asked the question. That question, from Heath Terry an analyst at FBR Capital Markets & Co was: "Was there some reason that the decision to do Pass wasn't done in front of the World Cup launch?"
When he says "in front of" he means "before" by the way, it's just that "in front of" is two words more important than saying "before".
"The honest truth is we've been preparing for this for the better part of 18 months. Our first step was with what we did with NBA Live about a year and a half ago when we had the Live season data. And the first time we put something behind a coupon code is we had first in the industry.
"We had to build our infrastructure. We had to get what we called our nucleus registration database into a bullet-proof position so we knew we could manage intelligence and entitlements without leaving the consumer sort of left holding the bag where we make mistakes. We've now got more than 60 million people that have registered on that database, and we're managing entitlements from it. But it took us a while to build. It may seem simple, but the underlying database structure and architecture to support it was not simple. But we're now in a position to be able to do it across the full range of titles from Electronic Arts."
Useful to know. Less useful to the person who asked the question. That question, from Heath Terry an analyst at FBR Capital Markets & Co was: "Was there some reason that the decision to do Pass wasn't done in front of the World Cup launch?"
When he says "in front of" he means "before" by the way, it's just that "in front of" is two words more important than saying "before".
Companies:
Electronic Arts
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Spinface 13 May 2010 08:36
1/1
"We've now got more than 60 million people that have registered on that database". Unless I'm having a stats brain fail, that must be a HUGE percentage of people currently playing games (beyond the uber casual stuff).