Expect More Microtransactions from EA: Publisher Made Almost $1 Billion from MTX in Q3

[Tsing]

Image: EA



Gamers love to whine about microtransactions, but unfortunately, they aren’t going away any time soon. For some inexplicable reason, people keep paying out the nose for them.



EA’s latest earnings report has made this fact painfully clear. According to a digital net bookings chart, which breaks down revenue streams such as live services (i.e., microtransactions), the publisher made a whopping $993 million on MTX alone during the holiday quarter. In comparison, game downloads and mobile made just $317 and $134 million, respectively.



It gets even crazier when you look at EA’s earnings over the entire year. In the last 12 months, the publisher made $2.835 billion off of microtransactions, a 27 percent increase from last year ($2,241 billion). That’s a ridiculous amount of cosmetics, power boosts, and whatever else players are getting suckered into nowadays...

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[Brian_B]

Well... interesting point. Mobile made $134M it says. The takeaway there isn't that the mobile market is weak, I don't think.

I'd say that sounds about right, because most mobile titles are F2P - you get the app for free, and almost the entirety of all revenue comes in the form of MTX.

This list makes me downright sick though. Fortnite cleared a cool $1B in mobile-only revenue, and it's only posting at #24 on the list of top earners.

List of highest-grossing media franchises - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[InSaNeOldGuy]

Not about making money........ Altho you could certainly argue that today's business acumen is just that. EA is Concentrated Evil as far as I'm concerned... I go back to Arcade then DoS then PC when games were created with Gamers in mind. What I mean is... They were built to appease GAMERS. (Not Stockholders) The games back then were awesome. Period. Nowadays............ Epic Freaking Fail, with EA leading the pack. CD PROJEKT is probably the only house that imo has a chance of purging said Evil, as I believe a lot of Gamers are fed up with EA / ETC. Will this be the Awakening we've all prayed for over the last several years ? Only time will tell....................

 

[stickx911]

I’m perfectly fine with cosmetic mtx. I’m perfectly fine with premium servers or on f2p games: grind skipping. Heck, with f2p, I’ll excuse a lot of mtx, it’s explicitly in the business model.

But for the love of god, keep that crap away from full price titles. If I pay $60 for a game and you want $10 for a map or something else that should have just been a part of the game? F off. Pay to win on top of paying for entry? Hell no. Fine line between good DLC and micro transactions, but I’ll leave that to personal choice/value as long as it’s not something the game needs to be playable....