Top Story
Things get steamy between EA and Valve in latest investor call
Corporate love is in the air once again as EA announces that they’re back together with Valve and that they will move their catalogue back into Valve’s love shack, including Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. EA packed their stuff and left back in 2011 to focus their amorous attentions on their own digital distribution platform, Origin.
EA will also be looking to spread the EA Access love to Steam users, after the service saw considerable success on PlayStation 4. Valve is obviously happy to welcome EA back into their arms to counteract Epic’s advances and exclusivity offers.
Battlefield is taking a year off to regroup before launching a new offensive in 2021
The last quarter revenue was mostly driven by digital distribution, with PC and ‘live services’ contributing most of the growth, followed by console and full game sales. Mobile revenue dropped 21%.
Apex Legends boasts over 70 million players, and it hasn’t even launched on mobile yet. Madden NFL 20 and FIFA 20 are, perhaps unsurprisingly, doing good business as usual. EA’s bread and butter franchises such as The Sims and their stable of sports titles will be expanded with new content over the next year.
Some highlights, courtesy of Daniel Ahmad:
- EA Access launch on PlayStation 4 grew subscriptions
- Battlefield V and Anthem updates are still in the works
- NBA Live 20 is officially cancelled and is being repurposed
- No EA title launches in Q4 FY2020, which spans January-March 2020
- Next major Battlefield title no earlier than April 2021
- Apex Legends is EA’s primary shooter series for next fiscal year
- Two unannounced partner titles from third-party studios in development
- Additional internal projects in the pipeline from DICE, BioWare, Maxis, Criterion and Motive
- DICE’s Star Wars Battlefront 1 & 2 clear 33 million sales combined
- Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order expected to ship 6-8 million before April 2020
- Dragon Age 4 not likely to release before April 2022
Time For A Quick Daily Quiz?
Which is these is NOT a real ending to a Silent Hill game?
- The dog was behind it all
- You get abducted by aliens
- Pyramid Head cuts you a birthday cake
- You get turned into a block of tofu
The answer will be revealed at the end of this issue!
News Bits
Launch trailer for Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding
Kojima’s latest opus is so close you can almost touch it, and Death Stranding hits PlayStation 4 next week on November 8th. In an effort to make the wait even more unbearable, Kojima Productions have released a launch trailer that goes on for no less than 8 minutes, which even includes some spoilers. Not that it matters too much – this is a Hideo Kojima game after all, so you probably won’t have any idea what’s going on until the 20th playthrough anyway.
Respawn “hyper-focused on Apex Legends” so no Titanfall 3
Grab a handkerchief so you can dry those tears you’re about to shed for Titanfall 3: EA big cheese Blake Jorgensen says that they “want to keep the team hyper-focused on Apex Legends.” That means there’s no time to develop Titanfall 3, but Respawn Entertainment “certainly won’t forget about it.” Apex Legends will remain EA’s big shooter for at least another year, as the next Battlefield won’t appear until 2021.
Daily Fact
Angry Birds had a touch of swine flu and caused a loss of appetite
The sensation that was Angry Birds took the mobile gaming world by storm — one might have even called it a plague. You wouldn’t be far wrong as the sickly green pigs in Angry Birds were designed specifically because of the swine flu epidemic at the time, which is a bit rich considering bird flu had just the same level of global hysteria. A pox on both thy houses!
Incidentally a study was conducted that actually proved Angry Birds could cause a loss of appetite. The Ryerson University in Toronto showed that people who played Angry Birds consumed 50 fewer calories on average during mealtimes compared with those who hadn’t played it prior to a meal. They believe this was due to the player being happier and so they ate less. Collectively the world has played 200,000 years’ worth of Angry Birds, equal to the stretch of time modern humans have existed.