EA game sales have apparently reached 30 million players, as the company recorded record sales in the 2017 fiscal year, which ended on March 31. The company’s two flagship titles for last year, Battlefield 1 and FIFA 2017, were the main parts of that financial gain, with Battlefield 1 having 19 million players while FIFA had 21 million.
Battlefield 1’s playerbase was nearly 50% greater than that of Battlefield 4 over the same period. Of FIFA 2017, 12 million of its 21 million players ended up playing The Journey, the story mode that was included with the game. FIFA Ultimate Team also experienced a 13% increase in players.
Blake Jorgensen, the Chief Financial Officer for EA, said that the main reason for the big profits last fiscal year was due to the company’s increased transition to digital media, rather than live services. This transition, along with its released games, made it the number one publisher on both the Xbox One and the Playstation 4 and contributed to the huge EA game sales.
Digital EA game sales totaled over 3 billion dollars, which represented 61% of its total sales and was a 20 percent year-over-year increase over the previous fiscal year.
For the 2018 fiscal year, EA says that they’ll be continuing to innovate for players with big new experiences, continue to grow their global network, and extend their reach across new platforms. We’ll likely get to learn more about what they’re planning to release this fiscal year at E3, where they’ll be holding a conference all their own before the main event starts.
With a large number of games to choose from as one of the bigger publishers in gaming, EA has a lot of ways that it can either impress or enrage a lot of the gaming audience. FIFA and Battlefield are two of its biggest franchises, hence their success, but they have to keep the goldmines coming if they want to keep up the sales like they did in the fiscal year.
