Most Interesting Points From EA’s Fiscal Earnings Call

Most Interesting Points From EA's Fiscal Earnings Call

Electronic Arts had preliminary financial results for its third fiscal quarter ended December 31, 2018. The report mentions upcoming Plants vs. Zombies, Titanfall, and Need for Speed titles as well as Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Sports titles will continue on as well.

“The video game industry continues to grow through a year of intense competition and transformational change,” said CEO Andrew Wilson. “Q3 was a difficult quarter for Electronic Arts and we did not perform to our expectations. We are now applying the strengths of our company to sharpen our execution and focus on delivering great new games and long-term live services for our players. We’re very excited about Apex Legends, the upcoming launch of Anthem, and a deep line-up of new experiences that we’ll bring to our global communities next fiscal year.”

Check out the Q3 2019 conference call transcript in its entirety!

  • Respawn’s Battle Royale Apex Legends is off to a very successful start. In under 8 hours since the launch of the game, Apex Legends had seen over a million unique players.

The launch yesterday was EA’s biggest reveal ever by peak and current viewers, and it quickly became the No. 1 game on Twitch.

  • Titanfall 3 is currently not in development. The Titanfall team has been working on Apex Legends. However, there is a mysterious new Titanfall project coming later in the year.

And as the live service evolves, Respawn also plans to launch a premium game this year that is a new twist on the Titanfall universe. More to come on that in the month ahead.

  • Electronic Arts’ model reflects the plan to sell 5 to 6 million copies of Anthem by March 31st, 2019.

Our teams at BioWare have poured so much passion into crafting every aspect of this massive new IP. Millions of fans played more than 40 million hours of Anthem in our recent demos, and we’re very pleased to see the excitement and retell on digital channels reaching higher than expected levels.

  • EA plans to offer subscription service on another “major platform”
  • Battlefield V missed EA’s sales target. The publisher attributes it to the pushback from October 19 to November 20.

Unfortunately, the later release date meant the game launched deeper into a competitive holiday window where heavy price discounting was a big factor. In addition, we also made the decision to prioritise other features, including a single-player experience at launch, over a battle royale mode.

In another EA news, Disney chief Bob Iger has mentioned that the partnership has been good despite the recent controversy.

“Over the years we’ve tried our hand in self-publishing, we’ve bought companies, we’ve sold companies, we’ve bought developers, we’ve closed developers. And we’ve found over the years that we haven’t been particularly good at the self-publishing side, but we’ve been great at the licensing side which obviously doesn’t require that much allocation of capital,” Iger said.

Regarding EA specifically, Iger said Disney’s relationship with the publisher has been “good,” despite what could be seen as issues recently.

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