EA are in the middle of one of those ever-so-exciting investor calls and have revealed that the next game the Battlefield series will be revealed this Spring with a release ‘Holiday 2021’, a.k.a. this Christmas.
The game will take advantage of next gen consoles so expect specific versions for Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5, and it will feature “full out military warfare”. Development is said to be progressing well and the team are actually a little ahead and will be ‘feature complete’ earlier than any other Battlefield game.
The next Battlefield is one of 35 games EA have in production but is seems they don’t have a basketball title in the works at the moment as previous entries have underperformed. They are thinking about ‘the best way to approach the game’.
As you might expect, Covid-19 and lockdown has boosted sales for the company with live services growing almost 25% netting the company $1,542,000,000 in net bookings. By comparison, sales of full games only brought in a measly $858,000,000, but digital sales are now outperforming physical sales with 62% of all games being purchased digitally. Consoles still account for the majority of all revenue, pulling in nearly five and half times more revenue than PC games.
There are also plans to expand the Apex Legends brand, including a mobile game, while management are “confident” in Bioware now they have a new leadership team. Interestingly, the Anthem logo was shown so it seems there is some life left in that game.
EA also commented on the acquisition of Codemasters, saying it will allow them top release racing games annually and that it was a ‘natural fit’ for EA Sports. They also say the deal will help ‘grow Codemasters titles’, interesting wording as the specify the games rather than the Codemasters company itself. That sounds rather like EA will swallow up the Codies and titles like F1 will migrate to the EA Sports label.
Source: Twitter / Seeking Alpha
