EA Sports releases at least three games from the FIFA, Madden and NHL series on an annual basis, and the NBA and UFC series join them less often. However, it’s only a matter of time when these games will stop coming out. Not because they are not selling well – they are selling more than well – but because EA Sports calculates that instead of selling games each year, it will be more profitable for them in the future to sell the subscription to a single game that will be updated every year.

Electronic Arts president confirmed it in an interview for Bloomberg saying that it was naive to think of the future of gaming was not in the subscription-based on-demand model, the way that Netflix works in the world of TV or Spotify in the world of music. Andrew Wilson says EA is already thinking about how the market will look like without FIFA and Madden coming out every year, but says the move to the subscription model is going slower when it comes to video games because of their specific design.

Wilson says that people can consume movies and music by subscribing regardless of whether they use a big TV, mobile device or something else. With the video game we still have that kind of freedom and we cannot play FIFA equally on consoles and cell phones, and that is one of the main reasons why we have not yet switched to a subscription model instead buying a game every year.

However, EA is aware of the fact that FIFA and other sports games are selling more and more in digital form and that the Ultimate Team mode and similar derivations in essence bring greater profit than the sale of the game itself. With that in mind, it is only a matter of time when all sports games will switch to a model of annual updates like on mobile platforms.