Electronic Arts Q3 2012 Investor Call – Battlefield 3 Sales, SWTOR Updates

Electronic Arts’ Q3 2012 earnings conference call just wrapped, giving us some insight into the performance of EA’s big releases in the last quarter. Here’s a quick run down of the major players: Battlefield 3 sold through 11 million units, FIFA Street sold 10 million units, and Star Wars: The Old Republic hit 2 million sales, with 1.7 million active subscribers.

Now here are some of the more interesting details that I sussed out of the chunky soup of numbers and terms that made my brain turn into cotton candy. Battlefield 3 caused Electronic Arts’ share of the FPS market to rise from 13 percent to 24 percent. They’re (naturally) not number one in the field, but that’s a hell of a jump.

FIFA 12 was a huge earner thanks to its microtransactions. $39 million in revenue is attributed to microtransactions in the game, though who knows how much of that is legitimate…

SW:TOR has some amazing statistics, such as 1 million unique logins per day, and an amazingly high average play time of four hours. I don’t know where you guys find all that time, but god bless you for that. As far as the launch goes, they boast a 99.5 percent server uptime, which is unheard of for MMO launches. In fact, some have wondered if the game’s lack of launch congestion was due to a lack in popularity, but the folks at EA want to reassure that it’s due to hard work and great infrastructure.

They promised more content for TOR to keep players interested. The first major update just hit, and they mentioned the next major update will come in March. Another interesting tidbit about SWTOR – retail demand for the game was higher than expected, so EA shipped out more retails of the copy in December that they originally planned to ship in January. That fluffed up Q3′s numbers a little, and they warn that the tradeoff will be that Q4′s sales will be a little lower in response.

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