EA’s CFO Eric Brown has said revenue from PC and DLC is important to the company, and it’s new goal is for a forty-sixty digital split between digital and physical revenue.
Speaking during the Credit Suisse 2010 Technology Conference yesterday and reported by GI.biz, Brown told attendees at his talk that “a principal growth driver” for EA has been extra content downloads for PS3 and Xbox 360 along with microtransactions for its free to play games from Playfish.
Using the company’s virtual card game FIFA Ultimate Team as an example, brown pointed out the last three versions of the game were “a major provider” with folks paying anywhere from “$500, $800, $1000 on digital trading cards so they can get the best possible line up of teams”.
“This has driven net digital revenue of FIFA from $15 million for FIFA 09 to $31 million for FIFA 10,” he said. “We don’t know where the number’s going to end up for FIFA 11, but we do know that we’ve sold more packaged goods units.”
Thanks in part to $30 million in digital sales for Battlefield Bad Company 2, full game downloads are also contributing “significantly” to the revenue stream, leading EA to plan on taking advantage of “full game downloads” of PC products even more.
“What we’re starting to see, especially for first person shooter titles like Battlefield Bad Company 2 is a higher propensity for people to purchase the PC client digitally<” said Brown. “This is an area where with our first person shooter games, our Sims franchise and others, we’ve been able to grow our digital business.
“Overall we’re growing our digital business by more than 30 per cent per annum. In the first half of fiscal 11 we grew our total digital revenue by 35 percent year over year. We’re actually taking share in digital revenue over all.”
$750 million of EA’s current revenue is due to digital offerings mainly on PC with console and mobile providing close to an equal share. That figure is up from $430 million in 2008.
Because of the revenue derived from digital, from here on out EA plans to “more closely match the 40/60 percent digital/packaged goods split” seen in the “worldwide market today.”
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