It's May 3rd.

With the first day of the launch of the game box platform, more than 33 million subscribers have been created to coax the industry,This news is still spreading,At present, the domestic and foreign game media、Industry insiders, including many capital institutions, focus on the game box。

The focus of attention from all walks of life is the subscription model of the game box, which has become the biggest topic.

IGN, the world's largest gaming and entertainment media, published an article on May 3 discussing the subscription service model, which has sparked a lot of attention and discussion in the community.

In the article, IGN digs deep into the game's subscription service model and provides a systematic report on it.

After reading this article report by IGN, many players know that the original subscription service model is not the first of the game box, and this model can be traced back to 1981.

In IGN's article, the first game download and subscription payment appeared in 1981, when Mattel launched a network peripheral for its Intellevision game console, which could transmit signals through local cable companies and download about 20 games for $12 a month, which can basically be seen as the prototype of the game subscription system, more than 30 years before the game box appeared.

However, the peripheral's memory was only 4K, making it difficult to store the 8K and 16K games that followed, and the difficult network environment at the time made the service less attractive, and it was eventually discontinued after only two years of operation.

IGN goes on to point out that a second game maker has since tried a subscription-based service, with Sega from Sega launching in 1990 and Sega as a network peripherals for MegaDrive at the time, as well as a game subscription service called Game Library, which allows you to continue to enjoy Sega's mini-games for 800 yen a month.

The launch of this service attracted the attention of many players at the beginning, but due to the generally poor quality of its games, there were few fun masterpieces, most of which were mini-games, resulting in fewer and fewer users, and it lasted for about two years before the service was terminated in 1992.

Entering the next generation of games, another top game manufacturer is trying, and that is EA in North America.

From The Sims series, Need for Speed series, to FIFA series, EA is a superplayer in the club of 100 million copies of gaming products.

His many influential works have made it a pivotal position in the European and American and even global game markets.

The company's business covers all aspects of game platform, hardware, software, sales, and service.

All these advantages have prompted EA to move towards the strategic choice of full-platform, multi-channel and multi-category game coverage, and such a strong EA also has the confidence to explore a new business model in the game industry.

So just last year, in 2014, the EA-Access game subscription service was born.

Players only need to pay $4.9 per month to play EA's popular products. Whether it is an old product that has been on the market for many years, or a 3A masterpiece that has not yet been released in 2014, it is all included. With an annual fee of $30, players can unlock all games that support the service.

Keep in mind that the price of a single product often ranges from $40 to $60, and now, players can experience multiple heavyweights for half the price.

IGN Media is combing through the history of game subscriptions, and then the focus is on, IGN throws out a series of question marks.

That is, EA launched a subscription service a year earlier than the game box, but it did not cause such a big circle breaking effect, and the monthly fee of the game box is $9.99, and the monthly fee of EA-Access is $4.9 and is twice as expensive.

Why did the game box become such a big hit as soon as it was launched? Why is this happening? Why didn't EA's subscription service detonate the market? What is EA doing wrong? What's so special about the game box?

IGN media coverage has thrown these questions to the outside world.

Now everyone is talking about this topic, and people from all walks of life are analyzing and interpreting the results.

The analysis of one of the senior investors in the game industry has attracted everyone's attention and discussion.

He pointed out that EA failed to detonate the game subscription service, the biggest problem is the lack of content, EA does have a lot of game works, but there are still not enough, one of the core elements of the platform subscription system is to have enough massive game library content, the more the better.

The industry veteran further pointed out that the biggest problem with EA-Access is that the game content it provides is limited to EA's games, and there are no games from other game manufacturers, and he also emphasized that this is beyond EA's ability, although EA is the top developer and publisher in the game industry, it still can't get other top developers' games to land on its subscription platform.

EA does not have the ability to command other major manufacturers in the game circle, and other manufacturers do not bird EA at all, so EA does not have the ability to integrate resources in the game industry on a large scale.

The meaning of this senior investor, translated bluntly, is that EA is limited by itself and cannot afford to play the big platform model.

Can EA acquire top game developers such as Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft at the same time? Obviously, EA can't do it, only a real giant group can do it, and furthermore, only a real super giant can have the ability to integrate resources for the entire industry in order to afford to play the big platform model.

Therefore, the conclusion is that the subscription service launched by EA can only sprout on its own, and cannot achieve the circle-breaking effect.

The reason why the game box exploded when it was launched,The parent company behind it has unparalleled resource integration capabilities,It can easily spend a huge amount of more than 100 billion dollars to buy and buy globally,Even EA can easily buy it as long as it wants。

The platform already has seven or eight thousand games in the launch stage, while EA only has more than four hundred games, showing an order of magnitude difference in the diversity of game library content.

For example, if the average game under the EA platform can attract 4,000 players, more than 400 games are 1.6 million players, and the game box has more than 8,000 games, and each game can attract 4,000 players, the total number of players on the platform is more than 30 million.

The platform has less than 2 million players, and the monthly fee is so cheap, the platform can't survive.

Only when the game content of the platform is enough to attract players with various preferences, and the total number of users can form an extremely large scale of users in the platform, and this model can be operated.

So this veteran came to another conclusion, EA-Access is not a rival to the game box, EA's size determines that its upper limit will never reach that level, and it cannot command other major game manufacturers in the industry.

Only giant groups such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google can follow up and integrate with the huge amount of money spent on acquiring a large number of game companies like Qunxing Capital, so that they can wrestle with the game box backed by Qunxing Capital.

As for EA, at best, it can only be regarded as a top third-party game company with distribution channels, and if it is less than $20 billion in market capitalization, it is not even as good as Activision Blizzard, which has entered the stage of privatization and delisting, and does not even have the qualifications to be a competitor of game boxes.

…… (End of chapter)