But remember that EA, as with many others, makes a massive part of its revenue from microtransactions. Oh yes, I’m sure the figure would make headlines, it’s a huge, huge deal.

So just how much is Microsoft paying EA for this privilege? Just some of the EA titles coming to Game Pass If you play EA games, and with FIFA, Madden, Star Wars, Battlefield and The Sims alone, that’s a lot of people, then Game Pass becomes a no-brainer, as does Xbox by extension. But Game Pass largely brings people into the Xbox ecosystem, buying hardware, accessories, and of course more content from the Xbox Store.įor Microsoft, the EA deal puts it hugely ahead of PlayStation in terms of perceived value, just as consumers are totting up the next-gen cost of entry, and total cost of ownership.

Yes, consumers can get it on PC, provide their own hardware and buy the rest of their games from Steam or Epic. While we can say that content is king, Xbox Game Pass exists in a semi-walled garden, whose walls are built from console hardware. We can certainly see big advantages for both parties. And that for me that yearning to be there makes it the biggest deal in modern gaming. To know how it began, what both parties wanted and what the final deal consisted of. More so than anything in the history of games, I want to be in the room where the Xbox-EA deal happened.

“It redefines the gaming space, it reminds us of the kind of deals that are possible, it makes us wonder, if this, then what next?” There’s a song from the musical Hamilton, you’ve probably heard it, called ‘The Room Where It Happened’ where one of America’s founding fathers is distraught that he didn’t get to be at the private meeting where one of the greatest political deals of the era was hammered out. I guess if Disney had hypothetically partnered with Netflix instead, or in retrospect the deal that put the then fledgling Premier League on Sky? I tried to come up with comparisons from the spheres of TV, film and music, and failed to match it. It redefines the gaming space, it reminds us of the kind of deals that are possible, it makes us wonder, if this, then what next? The EA – Xbox Game Pass deal is the biggest in gaming history.

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