EA confirms Anthem postponement to 2019 and will release Battlefield game in October oktober
Electronic Arts confirmed during its quarterly earnings release that Anthem will be delayed to Q1 2019. Additionally, the publisher has announced that a new Battlefield game will be released in October this year.
Recently, there were rumors that the game Anthem will be delayed until early 2019 and that has now been confirmed by EA CEO Andrew Wilson. According to him, this release should be in the first quarter of 2019 not be seen as a delay; a release in early 2019 was deliberately chosen, because that is a quieter period, so that the game will attract more attention.
Furthermore, Electronic Arts has announced that a new Battlefield game will be released in October. This release date may be partly the reason for the postponement of the release of Anthem. EA gave no further details about the new Battlefield game, other than developer Dice will make the shooter. Earlier there were rumors that the new Battlefield game might be Bad Company 3, but it seems that this game won’t be released in 2018 at least. Instead, there was another rumor that the next Battlefield game is set around World War II.
In the fourth quarter of 2017, EA suffered a loss of $186 million, compared to a loss of $1 million in the same quarter a year earlier. Revenue rose slightly from $1.15 billion in the last quarter of 2016 to $1.16 billion in the last quarter.
EA CFO Blake Jorgensen told Reuters that fewer copies of Star Wars: Battlefront II were sold than the publisher had expected. EA thought it would sell eight million units, but that fell about a million, which he says is mainly due to the controversy over the loot boxes and microtransactions. In mid-November last year, EA temporarily deactivated the microtransactions in Star Wars: Battlefront II, but according to Jorgensen, “in the next few months‘ Another form of monetization introduced in the game.
Commenting on its quarterly earnings, EA noted that players spent twice as much time on Battlefront II during the last quarter of last year compared to the original 2016 Star Wars: Battlefront. It was also reported that seventy percent of players have played the single player campaign.
On Tuesday, it was rumored that Microsoft is considering acquiring Electronic Arts. There are no details about the plans in that direction and EA did not say anything about it when announcing the quarterly figures. Microsoft would be eagerly looking for exclusive games for the Xbox One. Acquisitions from Valve and PUBG would also have been considered.