EA Executive – $60 For Retail Games Is ‘Exploitative’

Posted By: Nick Hernandez In: Gaming News On: 24 Mar

Ben Cousins, EA’s general manager of the company’s free-to-play division at Easy Studios, has called out the company saying that their standard business model of charging consumers $60 for a new game is “exploitative.”

“I’ve been doing this for four years now, so it feels kind of normal to me – but I can’t think of anything more exploitative than gating all of your content behind having to pay someone $60,” he said. “That’s a really harsh business model if you think about it objectively.”

“What we do is enable everyone to play the game, and figure out if they like it. If they don’t like it they can walk away and they don’t lose anything. How many times have we all bought crappy games for $60, right? And the majority of people in our game spend less than that – the cost of a full-priced game.”

This discussion goes back to THQ talking about lowing their game prices but the game studios will never make the move for lower prices as they are still selling like hotcakes regardless. I think that if the game can be completed in less then 6 hours then you should definitely get it for half the price of a game that will give you endless hours of enjoyment. But how do you guys feel about it?