EAAs we’d all suspected, EA has some pretty high sales expectations for BioWare’s Anthem. The publisher forecasts sales of five to six million for the online shooter before the end of the fiscal year.
EA CEO Andrew Wilson told investors (via GamesIndustry.biz) that the recent demo left players feeling like they’d played a game “unlike any other they’ve ever played.”
Meanwhile, CFO Blake Jorgensen revealed the publishers forecast sees Anthem hitting at least five million by the end of the fiscal year (March 31), which is just six weeks away from the game’s launch.
EAWilson said:
We think there is a great opportunity not just this year for [Anthem], but that should sell well for a long period of time as we add more content through the live service plan.
Despite a few teething problems during the earlier VIP demo, BioWare revealed that both demo weekends scored a collective 40 million hours of playtime. That’s around 4.5 thousand years, so not too shabby at all.
Hopefully the demo has generated enough interest to translate into the big sales EA is hoping for, especially given how invested BioWare seems to be in making Anthem the best game it can be.
The developer has been attentively listening to player feedback, even introducing a social hub to the game at the last minute in light of concerns that the game was lacking a real space for players to chat and hang out.
EAAnthem comes to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on February 22. EA’s other big game at the moment is the free to play Apex Legends, a surprise battle royale from Titanfall developer Respawn that’s managed to get some pretty big player numbers in.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.