Free-to-Play Won't Kill Paid Games, Former EA CEO Says

Just because the video game industry is seeing more and more free-to-play games, it doesn't mean premium, paid gaming experiences are going to fall away entirely. That's according to former Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello, who says in a new interview that the free-to-play model will continue to evolve, but it is "not going to swallow the world."

"I think we'll see a lot more business model innovation," Riccitiello told GamesIndustry International. "I don't know that in the end we'll ever see premium go away; you're going to have a creator who says, 'Look, the only way we want you to experience this is to experience it all and so we're going to give it to you that way.'"

One major publisher taking that route, at least with some of its games, is 2K. The company released an iOS version of BioShock this summer for $15 while the company just today announced an $8 NHL 2K game for mobile devices. 2K also released Civilization Revolution 2 for $15 on mobile devices recently.

Overall, Riccitiello said pricing models like free-to-play are a reaction to "constraints in the distribution pipeline." He said this is similar to buying a dozen eggs because it's more efficient than buying four.

"One of the things about digital content is it is often infinitely divisible into moments or minutes," he said. "You can decide that you're going to build your business model around constraints of distribution channels that may not even exist anymore, but you're going to pretend they do because your mind is stuck there."

Also in the interview, Riccitiello addressed Microsoft's recent $2.5 billion purchase of Mojang and the Minecraft franchise. "I can imagine [Microsoft] doing great things to make it work brilliantly and I can imagine another alternative," he said. "It's a lot of money, they must have thought it through, I just don't know what their plan is."

Asked if EA would have ever considered an acquisition at that price during his tenure as CEO, Riccitiello said it would have been very unlikely. "I don't think we ever made an acquisition anywhere in that zipcode for price and no, I don't think we would have gone after a deal at that price," he said.

Andrew Wilson is the new CEO of EA, and he's been working hard to drive home the message that the company needs to become more "player-first."

Eddie Makuch is a news editor at GameSpot, and you can follow him on Twitter @EddieMakuch