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EA CEO John Riccitiello has responded to reports that its new casual game IP, Boom Blox, bombed in its first month on sale, stating the reported 60,000 units sold in May are inline with internal expectations.
“Right now, [Boom Blox] has met our expectations internally based on the model that was put forward by Kathy [Vrabeck] and her team,” said Riccitiello at the William Blair & Company’s 28th Annual Growth Stock Conference. “It has continued to sell well – it did break into the Top Ten for the Wii.”
“With a game like Madden, or a game like Bad Company, or any of the other core franchises, the standard in the game industry is to market sometimes for a year prior to release, sometimes – at the bare minimum – six months,” Riccitiello explained.
This approach will see 20 to 30% of lifetime sales of a game during its first week, but this is not a strategy EA is using with casual titles. Riccitiello said casual releases such as Boom Blox have a “much flatter, much longer curve and one with which, frankly, EA has relatively little experience in”.
Riccitiello believes that the flatter and longer sales curve can still see titles selling upwards of six figures.
“A title like this one…Can it do several hundred thousand or a million or more units? Sure, it just has to keep selling,” he concluded.
We thought Boom Blox was well worth picking up and is certainly one of the best games currently available for Wii.
