Shots fired
Electronic Arts was “a little bit” surprised by GameStop’s comments that Star Wars Battlefront had “underperformed.”
As reported by Eurogamer, talking to investors, GameStop executive Tony Bartel stated that three recent AAA releases – Halo 5, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, and Star Wars Battlefront – had not performed as the chain had expected.
“We’re not going to quantify it in terms of actual numbers,” Bartel said, “but we had high expectations that diminished somewhat as it got closer and it failed to hit those lowered expectations.”
According to EA’s Peter Moore, however, Battlefront is still expected to hit its target – 13M copies sold by the end of March 2016 – as planned.
“[GameStop’s] comments were interesting and little bit of a surprise to us particularly as the CFO in the call then started to correct [Bartel] as the call went on,” Moore said during an investor briefing. “So from our perspective I’m here to reaffirm our guidance of 13M units sold in for the fiscal year.
“There is no weakness that is perceptible yet in the title and I want everybody to understand that based on where we think this title is – and based on the marketing beats ahead of us, in particular, the movie launch over the next two weeks – we feel very comfortable we’re going to hit the guidance that we’ve given analysts, investors and Wall Street alike.”
We took a look at the recently released Battle of Jakku DLC, and concluded that it was “all right.”
“We could use more of this stuff to keep the community engaged and coming back to the game. There’s an easy-to-reach toggle to include/exclude the DLC from matchmaking and, for what it’s worth, I’m keeping both of the new maps in my rotation.”
