Thursday, 27 October, 2011 at 21:14 PST | ^Scott^ | Print News
During EA's earnings conference call today, EA Games Label President, Frank Gibeau stated there would be a "robust set of expansion packs" planned over the next 6 months for Battlefield 3. One of those is of course Back to Karkand, but it seems we can expect more. Gibeau also commented about on their network service stability and are confident they can handle the additional load from the Europe launch this weekend. Some other Battlefield 3 mentions are listed from the transcript below.
Ryan Gee - BofA Merrill Lynch, Research Division
This is Ryan Gee calling for Justin. Getting onto Battlefield real quick, I was wondering if you guys can talk about your downloadable content or sort of add-on content plans for that over the next maybe 3 to 6 months? And then we're coming up to November when there's going to be competing shooter titles out there. How do you guys plan to maintain engagement for Battlefield during that time? And then maybe if you wanted to talk about Medal of Honor and how usage patterns either at retail or online changed in November last year?
Frank D. Gibeau
Sure, this is Frank. In terms of engagement, the Battlefield community has the highest engagement rates inside of Electronic Arts in terms of the online play. We do that through a variety of means. First and foremost, we have a fairly aggressive downloadable content plan out in front of us. We've already announced the Strike at Karkand Map Pack that is going to becoming available and we'll be constantly updating on the servers and infrastructure with new features and enhancements. Our plans over the next 6 months is to have a very robust set of expansion packs past on Strike at Karkand and that we think the community's going to be very, very excited about. (cont.)
Brian J. Pitz - UBS Investment Bank, Research Division
Congratulations on the successful launch of Battlefield 3 , it looks great coming out of the box. Just a couple of questions on that. We're hearing there's some issues with recent server outages that prevented gamers from accessing the multiplayer game. Did these servers go down due to a larger-than-expected demand or was it some other issue? And second, a quick follow-up, can you share any data points for how the game is selling on Xbox versus PC?
Frank D. Gibeau
Sure, this is Frank. In terms of the network services, we have had unprecedented and historic peaks in terms of the activity that we're getting from the Battlefield community and players, and it's caused parts of our networks to experience some outages. We were very rapid in our response there. We were able to get those back up. We feel like we've really gotten a handle on it now, and the service as it scales to the release in Europe this weekend, should be solid. In terms of that mix on PC and Xbox sell-through, we've only been out a couple of days, and we really haven't seen enough information to give you a solid trend answer for the mix there. I can tell you that the PC SKU is performing extremely well.
John S. Riccitiello
Battlefield 3 was launched on Tuesday and has opened very strong. We shipped 10 million units to retail and we are already receiving reorders. The data is still early but sell-through is strong.
Peter R. Moore
I'll finish with Battlefield 3. As you know, we launched this title earlier this week, and the results have been tremendous, thanks to the superb quality of the title produced by our DICE Studio in Stockholm, and the world-class marketing executed by our teams globally. Our marketing made adept use of YouTube where 13 million people have viewed our trailers and on Facebook where we have 2.1 million fans. Battlefield 3 PR was everywhere, and on launch date, in North America alone, more than 8,400 stores opened early to sell the game. We couldn't be happier with the launch of Battlefield 3.
So to sum it all up, we're nailing it in Digital and nailing it in Packaged Goods.
Arvind Bhatia - Sterne Agee & Leach Inc., Research Division
Great. One question on Battlefield 3 as well. Can you just remind us the mix of PC versus consoles for the last one? And are you expecting a similar mix for this one as well?
Frank D. Gibeau
This is Frank. The mix going forward on those titles, we haven't really announced, and I don't think we're in a position to really talk to those yet. I mean, we're only 2 days in terms of sell-through and we're looking at the reorders. But the PC, as I said before overall, we expect would've grown as an overall business just because of how spectacular the software is on the PC and what it looks like.