It’s no secret that a lot of players hate microtransactions and the “live services” that more and more games are currently implementing. However, it appears that these services are really profitable for publishers as EA has just announced that it saw a strong growth in its Forth and Final Quarter of the Fiscal Year 2018/2019 thanks to them.
COO and CFO Blake Jorgensen said:
“We ended our fiscal year with strong growth, driven by our live services business which continued to provide a very large, stable and profitable source of net bookings. Looking ahead, we will bring games to an extraordinary variety of players in fiscal 2020 and deliver on our commitment to players with deep live services content for Ultimate Team, Apex Legends, The Sims 4, Anthem and Battlefield V.”
CEO Andrew Wilson added:
“FY20 will be a year of continued growth for our industry, and we’re excited to bring more great entertainment to the expanding audience around the world. Players are engaging with games in more ways than ever before. We’re committed to meeting them where they are with a broad portfolio of amazing new games and live services, choice of engagement models including free-to-play and subscriptions, and new opportunities to play, compete and watch.”
What this ultimately means is that we can expect more and more EA games to feature microtransactions and live services in the future (as EA is making a lot of money thanks to them), despite the fact that Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order will not have any microtransactions or multiplayer modes.
EA also noted that its digital net bookings for the trailing twelve months was $3.722 billion were up 5% year-over-year, representing 75% of total net bookings. Furthermore, in FY19, more than 45 million unique players engaged in FIFA 19 and FIFA 18 on console and PC and the active players in The Sims 4 have increased by 35% year-over-year.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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