Games Thrist News Gamers Thirst For

In EA’s Q4 results, the second biggest games publisher in the world spoke highly of its upcoming lineup, the booming nature of its digital business, and, of course, Battlefield 3. According to them, the DICE-developed shooter is a “flat our superior game” to Activision’s Call of Duty, and if the pre-order numbers are any indication, the latter title better take notice. Indeed, pre-orders for Battlefield 3 are up a mammoth 700 percent over Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and we haven’t even arrived at summer.

More quotes and earnings results below the break.

The company lost $276 million in the year ending March 31st, a better performance from the prior year, when the firm lost $677 million. Sales remained unchanged at $3.589 billion compared to last year’s $3.654 billion.

For the fourth quarter ending March 31st, EA saw profit rise, at $151 million to $30 million in the prior corresponding period.

Said EA President Frank Gibeau: “We know we have a big competitor, but head-to-head with Call of Duty in Q3, we have the superior game engine, a superior development studio, and a flat out superior game.

Our goal is to significantly gain share in the huge FPS category and to put the other team on defense.”

Digital Madness

The firm’s digital growth up to the stratosphere, up from $144 million in 2010 to $211 million in 2011. From a full year’s perspective, downloadable content on both consoles and PC combined was tripled the firm’s fiscal year 2010 results.

Said EA CEO John Riccitiello: “We substantially exceeded our own ambitious target for digital revenue. We set out the year with the goal of hitting $750 million. In the end, our digital nonGAAP revenue grew by 46 percent and exceeded $800 million. I am particularly proud of EA’s rapid growth and scale in digital; and that our growth rate almost doubled that of the digital sector overall. We did it in a way no other competitor can and in a way that best addresses the future opportunity in the market.”

He added: “We did it across multiple IP, across all the relevant platforms, from social to mobile to console, and across a variety of business models. The consumer has changed. 200 million console players have become 1.5 billion consumers gaming on multiple devices. We are the only gaming company serving this larger opportunity.

In a few moments, we will take you through our FY12 guidance. Even though most will focus on the full year EPS guidance range, I would say that the underlying assumptions are more interesting.

“I’d now like to outline a shift in our strategies. When we established objectives around reducing title count, cutting costs and starting a digital business, we did so recognizing that we needed to execute a turn-around and the major part of what needed to change was to reduce titles and cost. Our strategies could be defined as fundamentally “defensive”

Today, we are announcing a big shift to “offense”. Over the coming years, we will transform EA from a packaged goods company to a fully integrated digital entertainment company.”