Peter Moore, COO of EA, recently said in an interview that essentially free-to-play is the future of video games. In 5-10 years, according to him, it will all be microtransactions. Get those credit cards ready, folks.

"I think, ultimately, those microtransactions will be in every game, but the game itself or access to the game will be free," he said.

"I think there's an inevitability that happens five years from now, ten years from now, that, let's call it the client, to use the term, [is free].

"It's no different than...it's free to me to walk into The Gap in my local shopping mall. They don't charge me to walk in there. I can walk into The Gap, enjoy the music, look at the jeans and what have you, but if I want to buy something I have to pay for it."

While Moore says the current retail system may survive, he believes that "the real growth is bringing billions of people into the industry and calling them gamers." He believes that the microtransaction model is the way to do this.

"Hardcore gamers won't like to hear this," he says. "They like to circle the wagons around what they feel they helped build - and rightly so.

"But we have seen, whether it was with the Wii getting the mom off the couch to do Wii Sports or whether it was, more recently EA Sports Active, where we got females who love to work out, all the things that social gaming did - Rock Band did it, Guitar Hero did it - all of the things that elevated it from being a dark art of teenage boys sequestered in the bedroom - that it was testosterone-filled content that everybody railed against - to where everybody is a gamer...if you can move your index finger and swipe it this way, you're a gamer."

And he tops it all off with, "And that has got to be the way it goes."

[Via Kotaku]

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