Via Gamespot.com:
EA’s Star Wars Battlefront was a hit with 13 million-plus copies shipped, but it wasn’t the only title from EA in that universe that performed well last year. CFO Blake Jorgensen said today that Battlefront, mobile game Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes, and free-to-play MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic did “extremely well” in 2015 and will continue to perform well in the time ahead. Looking ahead, Jorgensen says the sky is the limit for what it can achieve with the Star Wars brand, the license for which is has for the next decade.
“We see it as a great start–building a strong base of people that want to play in the Star Wars universe,” Jorgensen said about those three games during a speaking event at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in San Francisco. “And then leveraging it over time with action-oriented games, future Battlefront first-person shooter style games, new mobile games.
“As everyone knows, with Star Wars, there is an unlimited amount of things you can do with the content. And as Disney starts to add more and more new content, that gives fuel to our ability to add more games around it.”
EA has already teased it’s planning multiple Battlefront sequels, while former Uncharted director and writer Amy Hennig is heading up development on Star Wars game for EA, rumored to be an open-world title.
Also during the presentation, Jorgensen was asked to provide some insight into what EA has in the pipeline beyond this holiday. He didn’t give specifics, but said you can expect revenue during the year to come from this year’s Battlefield game and sports franchises, while Star Wars and mobile will to continue to grow.
Interestingly, he also mentioned two unannounced games.
“We’ve got a couple of things up our sleeve that we haven’t talked about yet but you’ll probably see them teased over the next six months,” Jorgensen said.
He didn’t say when these teases will be made, but E3 in June is one possibility that falls under the time window he provided. BioWare is working on a new IP, and this project could be one of the games Jorgensen is referring to.
EA has described its upcoming games lineup for fiscal year 2017 as an “embarrassment of riches.” Today’s comments from Jorgensen came in response to an analyst who asked how EA would follow this up in FY 2018. He also said that EA is trying to establish “rational growth.”
“We’re trying to build…rational growth instead of having a really good year and have a problem the following year,” he said.
Jorgensen also pointed out that about half of EA’s business comes from its own IP with the other half stemming from licensed content like Star Wars and FIFA. He said that although EA pays a licensing fee for a franchise like Star Wars, it doesn’t have to spend as much on market because the “Disney machine” handles that.
Some of EA’s big games for FY 2017 (the ones that have been announced, at least) include the new Battlefield game, a Titanfall sequel, Mass Effect Andromeda, and Mirror’s Edge Catalyst.
