EA will "lead the charge" with online games

Discs will be useless in five years

21 July 2008 13:13 GMT / By Verity Burns

EA Sports boss Peter Moore has said that he thinks we will all be playing games online within five years.

Moore warned that if the games industry does not move with the times, then it could end up like the music industry.

"You're talking to a company here that truly believes that every consumer will ultimately go online, whether it's five years from now. You're talking to a company that ultimately believes that physical media goes away, that how we get our media - whether it's games, we're already doing it through music, or if it's TV shows - it's going to go through Internet Protocols more than it is through cable or satellite," said Moore.

"Whatever you want to think about the future, there's no doubt that the Internet and connected experiences will be a bigger part of our lives than they ever have been. I'm always fond of saying that we'll tell our grandchildren that we drove to the store to buy a physical disc.

"In tomorrow's world we'll have half a terabyte of storage at home, everything will be in there, and we as an industry need to make sure we don't become another music industry," he added.

Moore stressed that EA would "lead the charge" into the digital future, saying that games without some kind of online interaction are already seen as "primitive".

One of the ways EA plans to do this is through Nucleus, its social games services that tracks preferences, scores and relationships so you can set challenges for friends across numerous games on different formats.

Nucleus will be implemented into EA Sports games plus Battlefield Heroes and Spore immediately, and aims to feature in around 25 titles by the end of 2009.