Electronic Arts held their annual investors call to go over financials for Q2 of fiscal year 2019 today and in the process spoke about the upcoming release of Anthem.
EA’s COO & CFO Blake Jorgensen stated in his opening remarks that the company expects net bookings from full-game digital sales to grow by 20%-25%. Jorgensen continued by saying that this increase is largely driven by the information they have received regarding Anthem, which they expect to skew towards digital purchases. Additionally, Jorgensen stated that their predictions for the fourth quarter of this current fiscal year have increased “driven by higher expectations for Anthem and Command and Conquer Rivals.”
After opening remarks, investors were welcome to ask questions and one brought up what made EA increase their expectations for Anthem. Jorgensen responded with the following:
“We’re also very excited about Anthem. Andrew mentioned it was getting a lot of positive feedback. We think it’s a fabulous game and you’ll see a lot more of it to come after we get out of this holiday window and into early next year. I think our original expectations of the game were probably too low and thus we think that’s important.”
Another investor later asked Jorgensen a similar question about EA’s new expectations for Anthem, and this time he went into a bit more depth.
“Anthem, it’s a brand new IP, so when we originally forecasted it we forecasted it at a pretty low level without a lot of information. That was last May or April when we put that forecast together. As we’ve gotten deeper into the final parts of the game and we’ve had it tested with a lot of people–clearly the excitement is building. It started building at E3 as people just learned what the game was and saw it. Typically, when you’re forecasting a brand-new IP, you usually start lower and then build that forecast over time and that’s essentially what we’ve done. We’re getting excitement both internally and externally about the game, as Andrew mentioned. It’s very different than anything BioWare has built in the past. It looks stunning and plays extremely well. That’s what’s given us more confidence around the forecast.”
We’ll have to wait and see if Anthem proves to be as powerful as EA expects, but early indications seem that it’ll likely be one of the powerhouses of early 2018. Heck, just take a look at Days Gone which seemingly was delayed recently just so it wouldn’t have to release in Anthem’s proximity. As Jorgensen stated in the call, we should begin to see more of BioWare’s latest project as we leave the holiday season, so look forward to more news at that time.
Anthem is slated to release on February 22 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.