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Mass Effect Andromeda helps EA’s full game download revenue rise 32% year-on-year

Mass Effect Andromeda helps EA’s full game download revenue rise 32% year-on-year

Despite less-than-stellar media coverage, it seems that Mass Effect Andromeda was financially successful.

That’s according to EA’s latest earning call, in which CFO Blake Jorgensen said that its full PC game and console download revenue had risen 32 per cent year-on-year to a whopping $111m, and that this growth was “driven” by Mass Effect Andromeda sales.

The title launched in March of this year to lower than expected review scores, which some worried might affect the game's commercial potential. Developer BioWare has worked hard to rectify issues with the title, releasing several sizeable patches. 

“Full game PC and console downloads generated net sales of $111 million, 32 per cent higher than last year,” he said, transcription courtesy of Seeking Alpha.

“This was driven by Mass Effect: Andromeda sales captured in the quarter. 34% of our unit sales are now digital rather than physical measured on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 over the last 12 months. This compares to just 27 per cent a year ago.”

EA was also asked about the sheer number of projects that it has in development across its portfolio of studios including Motive, BioWare, DICE and Visceral, and whether EA was going to appropriately space out its releases.

“Never too much product,” Jorgensen replied.

“I think we like our regular cadence. I think we've found a good cadence obviously with Battlefield and with Star Wars Battlefront. We're trying to make sure that we're leveraging our relationship with Disney on the Star Wars property, so aligning those where possible with their theatrical release schedules. So right now, our plan is not to change our cadence schedule.

“Clearly, we don't yet know how the cadence of new properties like Anthem or anything coming out of Motive will be – that's still to be determined. But I think we're pretty comfortable. We believe it rates a nice top line growth that's all organic from our teams, and we're very focused on making sure that it's very profitable along the way. So we want to continue to drive both the top line and the bottom line through new IP, existing IP, new live services, and margin expansion across all of those.”


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.