Andrew Wilson, the head of development for EA Sports, recently gave a talk entitled “Gaming 3.0: moving the goalposts”, in which he discussed plans to move EA Sports games beyond their current pricing model and into a future where gamers wouldn’t have to pay more to enjoy their favourite franchises across multiple platforms.

…he raised the subject of Amazon’s Whispersync feature, which allows customers to download a digital book for one price and then read it on whichever format they like from PCs to smartphones and Kindle, without having to pay again for each platform. He suggested that eventually EA Sports may well move toward the same model with its own games, even providing all of its titles, from Fifa and Madden to Tiger Woods PGA Tour golf, for one fixed price on multiple platforms ñ all linked by the same social gaming eco-system.

“It’s about handing over control to the gamer,” he said. “Ultimately, what we want to get to is this concept where we break down the barriers between the franchises. John Riccitiello our CEO says it seems like such a waste — we spend $20-40m making each of these games, but most gamers only ever play one, because the business model is an impediment. So how about we drive toward a model where every gamer can experience everything we make without paying that much more money. You’ve got to recognise that given the opportunity, the consumer will play and they will bring their friends.”

The gaming market is already heavily multi-platform; EA Sports titles get released on everything from iPhones to Xboxes (and other consoles) to gaming PCs, and other AAA titles get released on at least two of those (PC and console, typically).

For guys like me, who don’t play sports games and suck when playing games on console, paying one price for the PC-only version of a game isn’t a bother. The average gamer today, however, typically has more than one gaming platform that he uses regularly, and often owns multiple copies of many games…one for each applicable gaming system. And at one time, charging gamers full price for each copy might have made sense, before technology caught up with (and, in a sense, rendered obsolete) traditional pricing models.

“Games based around micro-transactions means that anyone can get in, we’ve lowered the barrier of entry ñ it’s iPhone, it’s Android, it’s tablet ñ all of these things now deliver a ubiquitous service of digital gaming that means that just about anyone can be part of it.”

Social and casual games have, he said, massively expanded the global gaming audience from 250 million a couple of years ago to 1.2 billion self-confessed gamers — but that this audience has radically different demands than the traditional ‘core’ gamers. Just as consumers have taken control of music delivery by abandoning CDs in favour of digital downloads, and just as TV viewers have moved away from schedules toward content-on-demand, he sees the future of interactive entertainment being all games available on all platforms when the gamer wants them. “Consumers are saying ‘we’re no longer going to line up at Gamestop en masse and give you money. We want to see an evolution in this space, we want to take control of games on the same way as we have taken control of music and movies.'”

… “Our vision is to move away from having your company or your platform at the centre of your creative vision an put the consumer there instead — because the reality is, they will put themselves there regardless of what you do. And you must provide opportunities for them to come in to contact with everything you make, on every platform that’s available. They will use technology against you, unless you empower them to work with you. You need to offer one connected experience. Netflix, Apple and Amazon have all demonstrated how this works in other industries — the reality is, it will be the same for us…”

I’m thinking this won’t be the last we hear of this idea. One of the other trends in gaming that has just begun to appear in rumours and conceptual discussions is the idea of having multi-platform games share save files between platforms; imagine you could play Mass Effect 2 on your Xbox at home and then pick up from where you left off on your laptop whilst on a plane to Boston, thanks to the fact that your save file was stored online, in your BioWare Social profile. Now, you can’t do that with Mass Effect 2 in real life, but some companies are looking at building games which do support that sort of thing.

Wouldn’t it make sense if when you bought the game, you bought that same sort of cross-platform flexibility?