Big digital expectations for EA

Underlining the growing digital aspirations of the major third party publishers, EA has set itself a lofty goal for the years ahead.

Speaking to Lazard Capital Markets analyst Colin Sebastian, EA’s chief financial officer Eric Brown has claimed that the firm is aiming to generate revenues in excess of $40m+ with up to ten of its key brands.

"We have franchises with digital attach rates well north of ten per cent of the aggregate franchise revenue," Brown stated. "We co-exist across all revenue models, while some of our key franchises will have exposure across ten different revenue models.

"We’re just over $40m of digitally derived revenue for FIFA – that’s a combination of console DLC, full game downloads, mobile extensions and free-to-play micro-transaction based games.

"Battlefield, we similarly have around $40m of digital revenue. Again, that starts with the disk and extends out in these different ways. So we’ve had success thus far.

"What we’d like to do, we have these two franchises at plus $40m digital extensions, what we’d like to do is get the next six to eight biggest franchises along and get tens of millions of digital revenue."

The comments come on the back of a strongly worded comment from the publisher earlier in the week in which it slammed NPD, claiming that the body’s sales data is "is a misrepresentation of the entire industry".