A lot of gamers are pretty vocal about their dislike of DLC, microtransactions, season passes, and the like. But as it turns out, loads of people are doing it. EA recently revealed that it rakes in around £925 million ($1.3 billion) a year from extra content.
EA’s chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen recently spoke at a a Morgan Stanley investor conference, where he may or may not have thrown a load of cash into the air and danced around the room as he made it rain. He probably didn’t, but I bet he wanted to.
Jorgensen said:
We’ve been a leader in driving digital extra content for games, which really drives the profitability of this business. The extra content business is a billion-three [$1.3 billion] a year. Half of that is roughly our Ultimate Team business.
The Ultimate Team concept was first introduced in FIFA, but has since expanded into the Madden and NFL franchises too. It basically involves players buying packs of virtual cards to bolster their virtual teams so they can win the virtual games.
Jorgenson reckons Ultimate Team is so successful because players will always spend money to beat their friends -based on the evidence present, it’s pretty hard to argue.
The $1.3 billion figure for extra content is a key player in EA’s digital revenue, which was responsible for over half of the company’s overall net revenue in the final quarter of EA’s last fiscal year. Ballers.
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.