Kotaku - Sources: Mass Effect: Andromeda Will Not Get Single-Player DLC

Now turning to net sales to discuss our business drivers for the quarter. Net sales were $1.09 billion, above our guidance of $1.075 billion and 18% higher than last year. This excludes $53 million of net sales related to premium additions of Mass Effect: Andromeda that we had originally expected to capture in -- to be captured in Q4. They will now be captured in Q1.

Focusing on Q1, we're expecting GAAP net revenue of $1.425 billion, GAAP cost of revenue of $157 million and GAAP EPS of $1.93. We expect Q1 net sales to be $750 million, up 10% year-on-year driven by Mass Effect: Andromeda, Battlefield 1 and Ultimate Team.

Just 2 for me as well. Curious if you could give us a deeper perspective, I guess, on what's happening within BioWare. Mass Effect, I think from a quality perspective, didn't exactly hit the mark. It looks like you've now delayed the anticipated new IP, which sometimes is also tied to quality. So curious if there's any change of leadership or developer turnover (inaudible) happened internally within BioWare. And then second question, PopCap. It looks like you have some layoffs in that studio. Obviously, the studio has good IP, used to, as well as (inaudible). Curious how you see the future of PopCap, and also if you're tinkering with headcount over -- on the overall firm or any trends there we should think about through fiscal '18.

So let me just make sure that was only 2 questions and not 3 or 4. The first one is what's going on with BioWare and should we read anything in from Mass Effect to the new title. So that collection of questions. The second one was what's going on at PopCap and should we read anything in there. Was there a third question about headcount overall, or is that just headcount related to PopCap?

Okay. Well, I'll answer the first 2 and we'll go from there. The first thing is Mass Effect is an interesting title. It was in development for a really long time and represented a lot of the great things that BioWare is known for: story, size, depth, breadth, imagination. And while overall the aggregate review scores were lower than we would have liked, we did have over 100 reviewers scored the game at 80 or higher. So it represents a fan base that's very passionate, looking for very particular things and many players found exactly what they're looking for and some players did not. With that said, we believe Mass Effect: Andromeda delivers a rich, deep experience, which celebrate what makes the franchise great: wonderful, beautiful, deep, rich world, amazing combat and engaging fast-paced multiplayer. New multiplayer content is continued to be released, and new content kind of arriving overall more regularly. So we're very happy with kind of how BioWare is doing, how BioWare is treating Mass Effect. And our expectations for Mass Effect are still strong for the future and the franchise overall. In terms of the new IP, the choice to move the new IP and what happened with Mass Effect are completely unrelated. The reality is, is we have a creative process. As a company, creativity and pioneering is really important for us. Now -- innovation in games is important more now than ever. And as a leader in the industry, we see it as our responsibility to innovate. And as part of that creative process, and I get to be involved in that creative process, we recognize that there was so much more opportunity in a connected network, social world to do some things in the new BioWare game that had never been done before and we don't think anyone is going to do any time soon. But by virtue of our network, our cross-platform presence and our scale, we think we can do that. And we chose to give the team some more time to deliver against that innovation because we believe players are looking for the kinds of things that we plan to put into that game. And so we're very happy with BioWare. BioWare has continued to support Mass Effect, and the new team is doing some amazing things and you'll hear more about that in the months to come. In terms of PopCap, again, I think there's a couple of different presences for PopCap. We have an amazing PopCap team in Vancouver that built Garden Warfare 2 -- 1 and 2 on console. That game continues to do extremely well, high critical acclaim, strong engagement and strong sales over its life. So we're very happy with that team. The team's building against mobile games out of Seattle recognize that the market continues to change, that brands are really important in the mobile space, but so is focus. The notion of building lots of small things really doesn't pay out the way it does in mobile like it did just a few years ago, and their decision was to refocus and really energize around a few core PopCap IP and that drove a slight change in structure there. But you shouldn't read into anything other than we are very, very committed to PopCap and very committed to PopCap IP and very committed to bringing that wonderful IP to players across devices in the future.