However, Gibeau claims Premium was not a response to Elite. According to him, ”We’ve launched subscription businesses in our other categories. We had EA Sports subscription before Elite came out, so adding that component to the design is not a reaction. It’s something we’d always been considering and we had been looking at.”
He then backtracked, ”Having said that, (Activision) did something really innovative and if your competitor does something innovative and you think it applies to what you can do, then there’s no harm in doing that.”
Gibeau hinted that Premium-style services could be popping up on other games. ”We actually think our Premium service exceeds what Elite does - from a value standpoint, from a content standpoint, and longer term we think that we can bring more properties into that offering and that’ll be great for the business,” he concluded.
