Skip to main content

Apex Legends makes EA a fortune, while The Sims 4 continues to print money

Apex Legends is one of the major drivers of EA’s current success, with the game making a load of money, and up to 10 million people playing the battle royale on a weekly basis. Also, veteran title The Sims 4 is still raking in cash despite being released five years ago.

All this was revealed with EA’s latest financial report, which shows the firm is doing well, with revenue hitting $1.21 billion (around £1 billion, AU$1.75 billion) and surpassing expectations.

CFO Blake Jorgensen believes Apex Legends will be a big money-spinner for the next 10 years, no less, and it’s now one of EA’s most reliable cash generators along with FIFA and The Sims.

Despite its age, The Sims 4 expansion packs and content downloads were up no less than 55% year-on-year – buoyed by a recent free giveaway (back in May) which led to 7 million fresh downloads for the game.

So it seems that those folks who were happy to get the game for free, were also happy to fork out for some DLC once they were hooked. This coming year will see more content than ever delivered for The Sims 4, EA reckons.

Seasons to be cheerful

Back to Apex Legends, and EA claims that Season 2 of the battle royale has outdone its expectations.

In a conference call, CEO Andrew Wilson noted of Apex Legends: “We have 8 million to 10 million people on a weekly basis playing the game.” And it’s apparently also the fastest-growing game EA has ever witnessed.

How does 10 million weekly players compare to Fortnite? We don’t have figures to draw any conclusions on this front, sadly (or with PUBG).

Of course, it doesn’t sound quite as strong as when Apex Legends launched and hit 25 million players in its first week, but obviously that sort of momentum was never going to be kept up.

The good news for those who enjoy EA’s shooter is that it’s proving itself to be more than sustainable, despite recent suggestions that takings from the game were falling (although that was back in May, before Season 2 launched).

EA pointed to the future of Apex Legends ushering in all manner of goodies including a full esports league, mobile game, and Season 3 being bigger than ever (naturally).

Meanwhile, on the esports front, the Apex Legends Preseason Invitational has been announced and will be held in Poland come September, featuring 80 teams competing from across the globe, for a prize fund of $500,000 (around £410,000, AU$725,000).

Via Reuters, Wccftech, EA



from TechRadar - All the latest technology news https://ift.tt/2YAVrCC
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The future of Magic Leap's promising AR efforts dim after layoffs

The Magic Leap Two is now further away than ever, unfortunately. Today in a blog post the augmented reality pioneer announced major layoffs and has decided to cut up to half of its workforce, according to some reports. The original Magic Leap One was supposed to be one of the first mainstream augmented reality headsets when it launched in 2018, but a high price point and lack of interest from developers left the headset high and dry after launch. According to the blog post, Magic Leap says it will be focusing its efforts on enterprise solutions (a statement HTC has made recently as well) and shift its focus away from consumer technology… at least for the time being.  The company has been open about creating a second headset that would offer improved specs for some time, but how that work will now have to go forward without half of the team , according to some estimates, remains to be seen. Is the window closing on augmented reality?  Although it’s just one company, Magic...
Post a Comment
Read more

Airship acquires SMS commerce company ReplyBuy

Airship is announcing that it has acquired mobile commerce startup ReplyBuy . The startup (which was a finalist at TechCrunch’s 1st and Future competition in 2016) works with customers like entertainment venues and professional and college sports teams to send messages and sell tickets to fans via SMS. It raised $4 million in funding from Sand Hill Angels, Kosinski Ventures, SEAG Ventures, Enspire Capital, MRTNZ Ventures and others, according to Crunchbase . Airship, meanwhile, has been expanding its platform beyond push notifications to cover customer communication across SMS, email, mobile wallets and more. But CEO Brett Caine said this is the first time the company is moving into commerce. While sports and concerts tickets might not be a booming market right now, Caine suggested that the company is actually seeing increased purchasing activity “in and around the Airship platform” as businesses try to drive more in-app purchases. He also suggested that both the COVID-19 pandem...
Post a Comment
Read more