EA’s David Rutter takes the reins as group general manager for EA Studios Europe

FIFA boss David Rutter has been promoted to lead EA’s European studios as group general manager for EA Studios Europe. 

The promotion sees Rutter relocate to Sweden, where he will oversee development at DICE, Ghost Games, and Criterion.

Rutter joined EA twelve years ago as a producer on FIFA 09, the first FIFA game to feature the Ultimate Team mode. He was then made general manager of FIFA’s Premium business in 2014, and later promoted again to general manager of EA Sports Vancouver last year.

“David Rutter has moved to Europe and taken on the role of Group General Manager for EA Studios Europe to lead our creators at DICE Stockholm, Ghost and Criterion,” EA later confirmed in an official statement (thanks, VGC). “For the last 12 years, David has led our FIFA franchise and EA Sports development teams at EA Vancouver and EA Romania to amazing success.”

In other EA news, the publisher/developer recently unveiled its financial results for the first quarter of the financial year 2020 (that’s the three months ended June 30th 2019) and it seems that digital is still going through the roof for the publisher, despite not having released any title during this Q1.

“Digital net bookings for the trailing twelve months was $3.73bn (£3.07bn),”  the report stated, which represented 76 per cent of all net bookings and a five per cent increase year-on-year. 

For the three-month period ended June 30th, digital was prominent. Total net revenue reached $1.209bn (£997m) during that period. Only 13.2 per cent of that revenue was made out of physical products, which represented $160m (£132m), while digital net revenue reached £1.049bn (£866m) – so 86.8 per cent of EA’s total revenue came from digital during Q1 FY20.

The gap between physical and digital is widening year-on-year, as for the same period in 2018, packaged good represented 15.8 per cent of the total net revenue ($1.137bn/£939m). Total net revenue for the three-month period ended June 30th 2019 was up 6.3 per cent year-on-year.