EA’s “Ultimate Team”, a feature which started out in the publisher’s FIFA games, has become one of its biggest successes, as it now generates around $800 million in annual net revenue. And it looks like the company wants to find a way to bring a similar system to the rest of its games.
Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen said that the real opportunity for Ultimate Team would be finding ways to implement a similar concept to other EA games.
Like Battlefield or Battlefront, our Star Wars game, which are very similar in the depth of play – we can possibly add a similar mechanic to that. We spend a lot of time thinking about it. Not for tomorrow, but over the next couple of years you’re going to see a lot more of that in our portfolio.
Last year, at the same conference, Jorgensen reported that the annual net revenue of Ultimate Team had reached $650 million, which was around half of the company’s earnings from extra game content for the year.
The quick growth of systems like Ultimate Team make it attractive for EA to implement it in all their titles. We may eventually see something like Ultimate Team in one form or another in all of EA’s future titles.
[Source: GamesIndustry.biz]
