Last night EA announced its financial results for the first quarter of this year, and the figures say some fascinating things about the state of the games industry. There’s number crunching below, along with some interesting insight into the workings of a major publisher.
Last night EA announced its financial results for the first quarter of this year, and the figures say some fascinating things about the state of the games industry. There’s number crunching below, along with some interesting insight into the workings of a major publisher.
This may come as a surprise to some (mainly publishers and developers) but according to EA they made quite a bit of money from games sold on the PC! Crazy I know!
PC delivered $276 million, the Xbox 360 $292 million and the PS3 $267 million. So the EA, one of the biggest publishers in the world, made more money from the PC than from the PS3.
With all the talk since forever about PC gaming being dead, these figures show the opposite!
So what were the stand out sellers, the stand out winners and losers? It seems that EA’s decision to go all digital may not be as crazy as you think.
EA made $342 million from those (digital sales), rising from $232 million last year, while physical sales made $592, dropping from $647 last year. If these trends continue, digital could outpace physical in a year or two…
This indicates that a lot of that money came from Origin which now has 21 million users. Battlefield Premium sold like crazy at 1.3 million copies. Fifa Ultimate Team has made $30 million already this year.
However, with winners also comes losers. The Old Republic was the big loser with subscriptions dropping by 25% since January, dropping below 1 million active subscribers.
According to the results, 40% of players said they didn’t want to play a subscription and might return if the game was free.
This poses some very interesting questions and shows some very interesting trends. PCs are making more money than Playstations, digital sales are catching up to physical ones, and subscription fees are going extinct (hooray!).
Source: www.pcgamer.com
