Battlefield 3 and Origin Subscription figures announced by EA

By: Musa Afridi

  |   November 1st, 2012   |  

Uncategorized

EA’s quarterly financial reports for Q2 FY13 (Second Quarter of the Financial Year 2013) show increase in subscriptions of both services as the publisher sees growth on the mobile and digital front.

Electronic Arts may have been slapped with the ‘one of the worst companies to work for’ tag in the United States but it seems the company is doing well for itself on the subscription and growing its user-base front.

EA launched its digital distribution service, Origin, and despite struggling at the beginning, the service has grown considerably over the past year as it begins to find its own identity and separate itself from the competition.

A number of games were pulled from Steam, Valve’s digital distribution service, and incentives were given to subscribers who purchased their content and games from Origin.

During an investor call, EA announced the total number of subscriptions that the service had amassed since its release, which currently stands at 4-million paying users, while the total figure stood at thirty-million subscribers.

However, it should be noted that a number of games require a subscription in order for players to access some of the content, which is a major contributing factor to those particular figures.

Peter Moore, the VP of EA, explained how the publisher was focusing on promoting Origin for PCs and expanding into the mobile space in the future. He said, “Origin continues to be a PC-centric service, one that’s moving quickly to mobile, but as things evolve in the coming years we’ll look at where the demand is. But at the moment Origin is very much PC centric and mobile centric.”

At the same time, the publisher also saw its premium Battlefield 3 service see an increase in subscribers as well. Battlefield Premium, the service, allowed subscribers access to every DLC for Battlefield 3 for a total fee of $50, similar to Call of Duty’s Elite service.

This along with Origin’s growth led to an increase in the publisher’s earnings from digital sales as opposed to physical retail.

John Riccitiello, the CEO of EA, highlighted this fact when he said, “EA is performing well, once again beating street consensus in fiscal Q2. We delivered yet another quarter of sharp digital growth, with digital revenue up 40% compared to the same period last year, reflecting our strength across multiple brands and channels.”

It will be interesting to see how EA grow Battlefield Premium and Origin in the future, as it expands into the mobile market as well. Apart from acquiring a number of studios and franchises that have established themselves on the platform, EA is still pushing to increase its share in a market that is dominated by Zynga.

Whether EA can sustain their growth or it fizzles out remains to be seen.