Lofty Goals? Battlefield 1 (15 Million) and Titanfall 2 (10 Million)
We all know the hype train has long left the station for EA’s upcoming Battlefield 1. When it was announced the reaction was almost unanimously positive as it felt like a strong direction for the series. It also helped that the reveal for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare didn’t really go so well. While we can probably safely assume that Call of Duty will still sell relatively well anyways we wonder if Activision is as confident in their product as EA is in its own.
During Electronic Arts’ quarterly results conference call, company CFO Blake Jorgensen spoke highly of the company’s expectations for both Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2 but with a little hesitance in regards to getting too far ahead of themselves.
First, we were very pleased with the reaction of players at our EA Play, I think you got a chance to play it yourself. It’s been very very popular, and feedback has been extremely strong.
We tend not to raise guidance too early in the year. We would like to see a little more demand metrics on all of our products, particularly Battlefield and Titanfall before we make that decision.
Gamescom is a very important beat that is coming up in a couple of weeks in Europe, and then obviously the potential for betas around those products will help us derive better demand metrics.
While Jorgensen remained reserved about getting ahead in metrics he used buzz words like they were going out of style like ‘super-optimistic’ and ‘very excited’ to indicate they were all expecting big things. He also went on to explain that a typical year for the Battlefield franchise is 15 million and that their current projection is ‘slightly under that’ although they’re hoping that the current excitement will propel sales well past it.
When pressed about Titanfall 2 he noted that while the original sold just over seven million total units that their expectations for the sequel are a fairly reserved ‘9 to 10 million units’. Considering the sequel is making its multiplatform debut one might expect that number to be higher but we’ll just have to wait and see.