The retail chain GameStop complained to its investors that Star Wars Battlefront had sold worse than expected. Electronic Arts sees it differently.
The sales giant GameStop stated in a comment to its investors that it shifted some of the blame to Star Wars Battlefront and held it responsible for potentially weakening numbers even in the winter quarter. They had “high expectations,” lowered the expectations for the release, and even these “lowered expectations” Star Wars Battlefront still underperformed.
This sounded so negative that Electronic Arts felt the need to release a statement. EA said GameStop’s comments were “interesting” and “a bit surprising.” They see no weaknesses in the title and are confident that they will meet the high expectations set forth to analysts, investors, and Wall Street.
These are the “marketing beats” EA hopes for:
At least there are “marketing beats” coming up. This likely refers to the movie. EA probably hopes that the film will help the game Star Wars Battlefront earn significant revenue again. Electronic Arts had expected to sell 13 million units, but they didn’t comment on the numbers.
Analysts had already stated to the US site Gamespot regarding the numbers that weak sales at GameStop could result from the fact that digital sales are increasingly rising.
Black Friday in the USA had other winners
In this context, an interesting statistic was compiled by Infoscout based on the purchasing behavior of 250,000 Americans who use their apps. According to this, the big winner of Black Friday in US retail was the game “Call of Duty: Black Ops 3.” It received 10 cents from every dollar spent on video games. Star Wars Battlefront only ranked 13th in the statistics.
