Electronic Arts’ digital downloads are going pretty great guns in the current generation of consoles. At its recent earnings call, the publisher noted how 29 percent of its games were digitally downloaded on Xbox One and PS4.
CFO Blake Jorgensen answered a question regarding the same (as per Seeking Alpha) and noted that, “On full-game downloads, we finished our fiscal 2016 around 24 percent of all of our games. And as we’ve talked about publicly, we lag the industry by one or two points primarily because FIFA is such a large global product. It has huge share in some marketplaces where full-game downloads, due to bandwidth or credit card capabilities, are not – it impacts that business there.”
Jorgensen then clarified that this was only for Xbox One and PS4 titles with PC skewing the ratio. “75 to 80 percent of all PC games are full-game downloads. That pulls the numbers up. We think the industry is going be probably by calendar year end around 30 percent.
“And our internal estimates are around 29 percent for ourselves, once again, slight lag with the industry. But as I said, I think we’re seeing positive trends on all of that, so that’s good.”
What are your thoughts on EA’s growing influence in the digital downloads sphere? Let us know in the comments below.
