Electronic Arts recently published its annual report for the past fiscal year. The publisher tripled its profits.
Not only did EA present the plans for upcoming games, the detailed annual report of last year is now available. Especially the idea of offering games as a “live service” seems to be a positive development.
EA Play Live goes digital in 2020!
See you on June 11th at 4pm PST… World premieres, news and more! https://t.co/ShTNzjqJ3D pic.twitter.com/xqmYfGBWfs— Electronic Arts (@EA) May 4, 2020
In total, the company was able to record a profit of over three billion dollars. Last year it was one billion. But beware: half of this year’s profit comes from a one-time tax refund of 1.5 billion.
In fact, the profit generated increased by 50%, from about one billion to 1.5 billion.
Full-price titles account for only a small part of the income
Digital sales accounted for 78% of net bookings last year. So less than a quarter of the revenue comes from the games you can buy in the store.
The majority of digital sales come through so-called “live services”. These include skins in Apex Legends or card packs in FIFA 20, which alone have generated over $2.2 billion in revenues for EA.
When she was nine years old, Loba Andrade witnessed her parents’ murders at the hands of the simulacrum Revenant. Now, her parents’ seemingly immortal killer has re-emerged, and she’s looking for a way to take the one thing that’s always been out of her reach: revenge. pic.twitter.com/4D1tMnw0oN
— Apex Legends (@PlayApex) May 5, 2020
Next quarter starts with remakes
Despite this success with microtransactions, the next games that Electronic Arts has planned for the first quarter of the new fiscal year are remakes. These offer few opportunities for DLCs. But we won’t know whether this will have an impact on business figures until a year from now.
