Some surprising news came out of Electronic Arts’ quarterly earnings call today. For the most part it was a routine call but one quote made by EA’s CFO Blake Jorgensen stood out.
While talking about how they expect the rest of the year to go from a financial standpoint, the CFO remarked:
“Note that this year the phasing includes the effect of revenue recognition from the games we are launching for the current generation of consoles that can also be upgraded for free for the next generation.”
Put simply, they are planning on making at least some titles that you purchase on a PS4 or XBOX One to be available for free upgrades to the PlayStation 5 or XBOX Series X consoles.
If EA Sports follows through with this plan, this would be huge for Madden gamers. Having to buy the same game twice in a year is a huge turn off for a lot of gamers. This change encourages upgrades to the next generation consoles.
There was one more additional piece of information that may be of note to football gaming fans on the call today.
An analyst asked about Electronic Arts’ current relationship with the NFL and was told, “Very strong. We look forward to building games for many years to come.” Additionally the management team went on to say that the Madden franchise is an important part of it’s portfolion and over time it plans to build out it’s football offerings.
We still don’t have much news as to Madden 21’s release date or new features. All we know currently is that Lamar Jackson will be on the cover.
Last year, the first news came out in late April so hopefully we will start to get some news out of EA Sports soon. EA Play is set to be virtually held on June 11th so we will definitely get more Madden 21 information by then.
Let’s hope that someone is listening. I would really like to see Franchise mode get better by a feature of having a better halftime show of highlights of other games going into the half with leads and how , with highlighting of post games played that week and most importantly some features of something like espn and or nfl network hyping up up coming games during the week leading up to the following weekend games. How awesome would that be?
how do you empty your bench