EA targets 10 franchises to bring in $40m digital revenues
"Some of our key franchises will have exposure across ten different revenue models" - Brown
Electronic Arts continues to detail its digital ambitions, with chief financial officer Eric Brown stating that the publisher wants up to ten of its key franchises to create revenues of over $40 million.
The company already claims to have two stalwart series performing at that level - FIFA and Battlefield - both of which have spun-off from traditional boxed product to smartphone, free-to-play, micro-transaction and other digital formats with considerable success.
"We have franchises with digital attach rates well north of ten per cent of the aggregate franchise revenue," Brown told Lazard Capital Markets' Colin Sebastian.
"We're just over $40 million 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 $40 million 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 $40 million 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," he detailed.
While he doesn't expect all boxed product to transition completely to a digital model, he did cite the success of FIFA in East Asia as evidence of how a franchise can evolve to adopt a completely different business model.
"We've actually experienced a real world case study with FIFA in Korea, which was previously a purely packaged goods model and has now, not perhaps very recently, but over three years or so, migrated completely to a free-to-play model."
And Brown added that EA is willing to try all new business models, with some titles taking on multiple routes to monetisation.
"You'll see FIFA across every single platform, with every conceivable monetisation model," he said. "We co-exist across all revenue models, with some of our key franchises will have exposure across ten different revenue models."
Selected highlights of Eric Brown's Q&A at the Lazard Capital Markets Technology & Media Day can be read here.