The Gamerbase Finally Makes Cents and Dollars to EA
EA has been slammed lately with bad news. Whether it’s Mass Effect Andromeda‘s abrupt end of DLC, Star Wars Battlefront‘s Season Pass woes, and another accursed iteration of NCAA Football 20XX that has the same bugs as NCAA Football 2014, EA hasn’t been feeling so hot. But in an interview published by MCV UK, Laura Miele (EA’s Executive VP) offers some refreshing news: the gamerbase is greater than gamers’ dollars.
Miele stated that monitoring the Net Promoter Score of their games – a metric that roughly tracks how likely people are to recommend a product or service – has changed the way they look at their business. NPS scores are now EA’s “number one primary success metrics”, she says.
“It’s no longer revenue”, she adds. “That has evolved how people feel about our games and, ultimately, how they feel about EA.” She stated that this change in thinking came as their games moved more to ‘live service’ models.
“We now measure player sentiment and player engagement over dollars or unit sales”, Miele adds. But where have we seen proof of this lately? Mass Effect Andromeda even after its shaky start seems effectively killed. But there’s another game that’s doing quite well for EA: Battlefield 1 has over 21 million players in its gamerbase, and has seen “the largest engagement” of the franchise. However, it’s worth noting that Battlefield 4 had a large community going into the launch of Battlefield 1, and one could say that the Battlefield series stands as a separate outlier from EA.
Miele says that this strategy will be employed for future games as well, including the upcoming Star Wars Battlefront 2. That game has ditched the season pass model that divided the previous game’s community.