Battlefield 3 pre-orders hit 1.25M, SWTOR still on track for Q4
During the Citi 2011 Tech Conference on Wednesday, September 7, Electronic Arts CFO Eric Brown announced that Battlefield 3 pre-orders have hit around the 1.25 million mark, and are tracking ahead of previous Battlefield games.
“To date we have about 1.25 million preorders on Battlefield 3, so it’s still well ahead of its predecessor title, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, in regards to preorders in the same number of weeks till launch,” he said during the conference, which was listened to by Gamasutra. “So it’s doing very well.”
For comparison and reference, Bad Company 2 moved 5 million units as of May 2011 across all formats. The firm also plans on spending oodles on marketing, and has plenty set aside for its budget.
“We have a pretty extensive campaign planned for Battlefield 3,” he said. “We have the advantage of a two-and-a-half week early launch window versus our competitor [Modern Warfare 3], and we intend to use that.”
Brown also said during the conference that Star Wars: The Old Republic is still aiming for a Q4 release, but, as the firm mentioned earlier in the year, it is prepared for a possible slip into Q1 2012.
“We have a date set internally, with a lot of assumptions around it,” he said. ”We’re not done until we’re done. … We’re not going to know with enough certainty to publicly announce a release date, until later this month or sometime in October.”
Battlefield 3 sales estimates up to 11m for first year
Analyst firm Cowen & Company is raising its first-year sales estimates for EA's Battlefield 3 from 8 million to 11 million.
The game, already benefiting from an extensive marketing campaign ahead of the October release, is seeing pre-order's "roughly comparable" to last's year's Call of Duty: Black Ops - a title that has so far sold over 20 million units worldwide.
Yesterday Electronic Arts began taking pre-orders for Star Wars: The Old Republic and announced a beta for September, ahead of a holiday release, causing shares in the publisher to take a slight dip.
"We would have expected this to be greeted as good news, since a 2012 launch appears unlikely, but the mildly negative reaction by ERTS shares yesterday suggests investor expectations for the game are quite high," commented Cowen & Company.
The firm now expects a launch for the anticipated MMO in December, rather than October.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2011-07-22-battlefield-3-sales-estimates-up-to-11m-for-first-year
