Tetris Enters The Subscription Age With New iOS Version

EA Mobile and The Tetris Company have launched a new Tetris game for iOS devices, which features a paid subscription option for accessing exclusive content and accelerating players' rank progress. The $0.99 game (introductory rate), which replaces EA Mobile's previous Tetris game on Apple's App Store, debuts a "Marathon One Touch Mode" control scheme designed for touchscreen gameplay on iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads. It also adds Tetris Log, a feature that offers players fresh challenges, tracks their progress clearing lines across multiple devices, and assigns them a Tetris Rank -- all powered by Electronic Arts' digital distribution and DRM platform Origin. Another notable addition is T-Club, an "elite Tetris fan club" requiring a $2.99 monthly or $29.99 annual fee. Subscribers receive exclusive discounts and content, premium Tetris Log challenges, and a booster for progressing their Tetris Rank faster. This effort to introduce a subscription element to a major non-MMO franchise is reminiscent of Activision's new Call of Duty: Elite service, which features free/premium memberships for stat tracking and other features for CoD: Modern Warfare 3 and Black Ops. Take-Two Interactive's chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick also recently commented on CoD Elite and game subscriptions to Reuters, saying "I've said for years the holy grail of our business is to take a packaged goods release and turn it into a subscription model."