EA ramps up Star Wars Battlefront sales expectations

EA ramps up Star Wars Battlefront sales expectations
David Scammell Updated on by

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EA expects to sell-in 13 million units of Star Wars Battlefront by the end of March 2016, 3-4 million more than it had previously forecast.

The increased sales expectations comes off the back of this month’s multiplayer beta, which EA says was “exceptionally well received by players”, and the ongoing excitement for this December’s blockbuster.

“On preorders, I think when you look back, and you’ve heard from both Blake [Jorgensen, CFO] and Andrew [Wilson, CEO] how powerful this beta was for us, and that certainly spurred tremendous pre-order growth,” COO Peter Moore commented during EA’s Q2 earnings call last night (transcribed by Seeking Alpha). “Every week subsequent to the beta, we had 9.5 million users who logged in 1.6 billion minutes of gameplay.

“On top of that, we were very fortunate, obviously, that The Force Awakens movie trailer came right on top of that, and that’s allowed us to be able to generate even more publicity for the game as people start to anticipate the movie in mid-December. You combine that with all the engagement that our players have creating content themselves, a lot of user-generated content with millions of hours now of gameplay coming out of the beta on YouTube and Twitch.”

He continued: “Now if Han Solo was here, we’d say great but, ‘Don’t get cocky, kid’. “Our ability to be able to deliver against this is solid and the pre-orders are excellent, so you’ve heard from both Blake and Andrew. We feel very good about 13 million units.”

EA had previously expected to sell 9-10 million units of Star Wars Battlefront during its current financial year, which ends on March 31, 2016.

Lifetime sales projections, however, have yet to be disclosed.

Star Wars Battlefront launches on PS4, Xbox One and PC on November 19.

Source: seekingalpha.com