EA hands out early sports game access to ‘Season Ticket’ buyers

Game publisher Electronic Arts today unveiled the “EA Sports Season Ticket” program, a yearly subscription that gives gamers early access to sports titles and discounts for downloadable content.

Players who pay an extra $25 for the yearly subscription will be able to play five sports titles — FIFA Soccer, Madden, Tiger Woods PGA Tour, NHL and NCAA Football — three days before the titles are officially released. They will also get a 20 percent discount on paid downloadable content, as well as access to a host of other premium content online.

“It’s geared toward the hardcore guys. They know Madden ships on August 30 and they can’t wait till August 30,” EA Sports’ vice president of corporate communications told VentureBeat. “We spent a lot of time building the program, and we expect it to grow.”

That gives EA an additional subscription revenue stream on top of its typical game sales. It taps into a very passionate player base that is interested in buying additional content for sports games, but it doesn’t compare to other premium subscription services like Activision-Blizzard’s Call of Duty Elite social gaming network, ThinkEquity senior research analyst Atul Bagga told VentureBeat.

“This is a step in the right direction, from EA’s perspective they are trying to increase the engagement of their users and create a community feeling for people passionate for these games,” he said. “It seems like an interesting concept, but it seems like it’s still too little.”

Bagga said the company should focus on fleshing it out into a full social network like the Call of Duty Elite network. That would mean sponsoring tournaments and providing new ways for gamers to communicate with other sports gamers across several games, he said.

EA is known for pioneering a lot of new programs and content with its sports games, which make up about 20 percent of its business. So the EA Sports Season Ticket program could make its way to other parts of the company, although Tinson wouldn’t specify which in-house studios were considering it.

“It’s kind of a crawl, walk, run kind of thing — it’s the first day of a first year of a program,” he said. “There’s genre synergy in EA Sports, that makes sense for us, and the title list could definitely evolve.”

The program wasn’t designed to help reduce used game sales, which large publishers frequently try to battle. Retailers like GameStop make a large amount of money by buying and re-selling used games, which takes a potential sale away from a publisher like EA. That has prompted publishers to require gamers to purchase “passes” to access premium content.

“It wasn’t designed with used games sales in mind,” Tinson said. “It’s hard to say what kind of impact it might have on those sales, but we are pretty confident our fans will like it.”