EA Fiscal Report Reveals Launch Expectations for Anthem

A game like Anthem can easily hit that mark. With EA attached to it, that's a different story... Honestly though, it's ridiculous how some people are acting about this game, simply because EA is the publisher.

I've never been one to blame EA for everything but that article is a complete joke. They blamed the 2-3 hour campaign for a big portion of the failure. Fucking really?! I really hope that a lot of other countries follow Belgium, EU and Netherlands in banning loot boxes...

It's not impossible, but I wouldn't bet on it.



This sounds... concerning. Activision said similar things last year and we all know what happened there.

EA must have a short memory or they just have their head buried in each others asses. God Of War sold 3.1 million in 3 days and over 5 in a month. Blaming the failure on a SP campaign is just ridiculous. There's no way they put that much time in a 3 hour campaign to warranty that BS...

From the transcript of the earnings report:

"We have modest expectations for Battlefield and Anthem live services given that they are not yet proven. We continue to refine mobile live services and work on new games."

www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2019/02/05/electronic-arts-inc-ea-q3-2019-earnings-conference.aspx

It also seems there Battlefield V SP focus being detrimental was that they focused on making that experience great before launch instead of finishing the Battle Royale mode, such that the game didn't have that mode at launch, which hurt sales.

This is very true. It does seem like single player games, like those you mentioned, as well as RDR2, HZD, and others have shown that there can be very good success for SP only and SP focused games.

However, it will be interesting to see the lifetime-earnings of those games over games with live-service. GTA online laughs at the numbers of the games you mentioned with $6 billion earned. Not that every live-service game will have that much success, obviously.

It's very possible that Anthem could under-sell God of War but make twice as much or more in revenue. We'll just have to wait and see.

Statistics on average sale numbers of multiplayer and single player titles would also be helpful, as those examples you gave are more likely than not the exception and not the rule (although I may be wrong).

The long term revenue is not the substance. Imagine a videogame industry where ALL the games are a GaaS.

Revenue or not, it is the SP tilted games which drives the industry in areas such as innovation and storytelling. 10 years from now people will not look back at Division 2 and talk about how ground breaking it was....but they will do so about KOTOR, Mass Effect 1, Deus Ex, Last of Us, Uncharted etc....

Hell, even GTA Online was able to have the recognition that it had because of the success of the SP history of the series. GTA really kicked off with GTA3 and Vice City.....both were SP games.

Despite the success of GTA Online, I doubt R* would be as bold as making GTA6 an online only game with no SP....like Black Ops 4. This is why the approach R* takes is better than Bioware. RDr2 and GTA5 has the online GaaS component, but also has a full fledged SP with high quality. Bioware could have done the same. They could have created a full fledged SP component of Anthem with dialog options various hubs and open world gameplay. And in addition, they could have had a complementary coop MP focused component which would be similar to what Anthem is now. Either they or EA choose not to.

Even Cyberpunk 2077 will have some sort of online component but it is still a SP game.

Witcher 3 is a SP focused game but they were still able to monetize the brand with the gwent card game which is basically a F2P GaaS.

Of course long term revenue is of great importance. Fortinite or GTA that you mentioned, are there as proof of this, Rockstar even pretermit GTAV single player in favor of the Online version. Even cdprojekt is entering this field too by making a multiplayer mode on their next game Cyberpunk.

Also Bioware did say they integrated a single player storytelling with a online mode via the duality of Fort Tarsis and Bastion. What we don't now yet is if they were sucessfull on said integration, only the release will tell us that.

Man. Bioware is on the chopping block. 
I hope Anthem makes it on its own merits, because it will probably be a nice fun game. But the way people get riled up when EA's involved...

One should probably not hope too much for live content after release >_>

Also: Wilson told investors to expect "deliberate changes to our organization and operational focus."

What does this mean? Even more aggressive microtransactions? Or the opposite? Will they goddamn finally focus on SP?

Maybe they mean to tell investors that EA will actually start focusing less on their shareholders/investors, and more on the consumers, by actually producing and releasing games that are meant to 'WOW' the 'gamers' rather than 'WOW' the wallets of aforementioned shareholders/investors.

EA going a more pro-consumer route, releasing great games that has little to no focus on microtransactions and every single fiscal year earning, accepting a stagnation of a couple of millions yearly over attempting to push for growth every single year resulting in reducing game quality, it might very well be very good for EA to do this.

They are a large corp with lots of resources... they could certainly earn a lot more money this way.

But.

That is just pure, childishly-innocent optimism.

They will probably start focusing more on mobile games and release for the chinese market.

Best case, the bioware studio is dissolved.

Dragon Age franchise is put up for sale.

Another studio not related to EA picks up the franchise and continues it.

Red Dead Redemption 2 would like a word with reported 17million units in the first 2 weeks and the second biggest opening weekend sales in all entertainment with reported £556 million made


SP aint dead, SP linear aint dead, if anything this gen has shown that done right it can be the biggest sellers in the market an companies like Sony have took advantage of it with titles like HZD, GOW etc an then CDPR with W3 an rockstar with RD2, heck even skyrim still sells.

EA an BioWare just haven't done or even attempted to do anything close to these titles an i doubt they will