The world has changed

There’s a fascinating interview with EA executive Frank Gibeau on Venture Beat.  Amongst the golden nuggets:

We burned the ships and marched inland. [Laughs] About 76 percent of our revenue this quarter was digital, not disc-based. We’re off to the races.

EA is the third biggest games publisher in the world, and they’re seeing more than three quarters of their revenue coming from sources that didn’t really exist ten years ago. Staggering.

So we know the world has changed, and EA appears to be adapting to it, but who else is winning?

The quarter was a bit of an anomaly because we didn’t put out any blockbuster console titles, but our biggest retail partner, measured by dollar volume, in Q1 was not Best Buy or GameStop. It was Apple.

Ok, it was a strange quarter, but nonetheless, this is astonishing.  If digital revenue didn’t exist ten years ago, the Apple App store is only 5 years old.