I know that I’m not alone when it comes to my gaming habits in that I haven’t purchased a physical copy in quite some time. Specifically, once PS4 launched, I decided the convenience of launching any title within seconds far outweighed the urge to collect physical copies which also meant the dreaded disc swapping. On top of that, my wife and I can enjoy games like Destiny together and pay only once. Here’s Electronic Arts Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen on retail and digital.

We take a very simple view. We want the consumer to decide. We have great retail partners, we want to continue to maintain our great retail partners and they perform a lot of discovery and marketing services for us. And so, we believe there’s a world where the retail partners are always going to be around, but also a lot of consumers, just like music and books, and movies, and TV have adopted, download digitally is ultimately the way of the future. We try to make sure that we’re available in any place the people want to bay our games.

What he really means is that we know digital is the future but we don’t want to piss off GameSpot and Walmart right now. After the jump, his thoughts on subscription models.

Long-term, we think there’s multiple models for delivery of games. People will buy games in the retail stores, they’ll acquire them digitally from us, or they may subscribe to them and play in a subscription model.

It remains to be seen how subscription models move beyond single titles like MMORPG and season passes as services like PlayStation Now and EA-owned Origins expand. Currently, there exists broadband limitations for many in the US (which is sad since most only need a meager 15 Mbps download speed). But will gaming eventually evolve into a Netflix-like service? I’m not sure.

Discuss:

Have you gone fully digital or do you still purchase disc-based games? Also, do you think the subscription model is the future of gaming?