During today's earnings report for its third fiscal quarter in the 2022 fiscal year, Electronic Arts announced the three months to December 31 was the biggest quarter ever for net bookings, underlying profitability, and cash generation. And it was all led by FIFA 22 and Apex Legends.

At quarter-end, Apex Legends monthly active players were up more than 30% year-over-year, with 28 million players joining the free-to-play battle royale shooter in the past year alone. EA expects the game to reach $1 billion in net bookings this fiscal year (April 21 - March 22). EA proclaimed that Apex Legends players pinged locations, items, and enemies 322 billion times. It was obviously a huge year for the game.

The publisher also claimed that it now has more than 540 million unique active player accounts in its network, with an average of more than 180 million monthly active accounts through the reported time period. Players typically are spending 20% more time in EA games compared with the previous fiscal year.

EA Conference Call:

- 28 million new players joined Apex Legends in the past year.
- Expect the game to reach $1 billion in net bookings this fiscal year (April 21 - March 22)
- MAUs were up 30% YoY
- Huge year for the game
- Soft launching Apex Legends Mobile soon. pic.twitter.com/eO6xTH9Jq7

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) February 1, 2022

According to Forbes, net bookings for the reported quarter sat at $2.577 billion, an increase of $177 million from the previous year. Electronic Arts' total net revenue came in at $1.789 billion, up by $116 million from Q3 2021, and net bookings for the trailing 12 months were up 22% year over year. And with the soft launch of Apex Legends Mobile rolling out in the near future, these numbers should increase.

While tent pole games like Apex Legends and FIFA continue to be huge hits, there were some stunning admissions made during the earnings call about one noticeable miss.

“The launch of Battlefield 2042 did not meet expectations,” EA CEO Andrew Wilson said. Employees working from home because of the pandemic was a much bigger challenge than EA anticipated. The game encountered a number of unanticipated performance issues that needed to be fixed, and some of the game's core design choices simply didn't land well with the player community. Despite all that, developer DICE recently announced plans to improve the game over the coming months and EA still has plans to release major updates.

During the call, EA revised its net bookings estimate down to $7.525 billion (a drop of $100 million), blaming the reduction squarely on Battlefield 2042. Growth was seen in other parts of the business, specifically from FIFA and Apex Legends, which managed to offset the shooter's poor financial performance.

The bad news doesn't stop there. At the time of this writing, Electronic Arts Inc. stock has dropped more than 5% in after-hours trading saying that it expects a slower start to 2022 than was anticipated.

While EA has already let the Gundark out of the bag with its recent announcement regarding several new Star Wars games in development, it revealed that there are 3 - 4 additional unannounced projects in the works.

Apex Legends is available now for PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.



Posted: Feb 03, 2022 7:43 pm
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://gamerant.com/apex-legends-28-million-new-players/