Whilst High Street sales of PC software can paint a picture of decline, the un-monitored online revenues coming from the format are drastically increasing – a fact that helped EA enjoy a strong performance on the format last year.
VG247 points out that EA released 32 PC games in its last fiscal year – far ahead of Xbox 360 (26), PS3 (23), DS (22), Wii (21), PS2 (14), PSP (8) and Xbox (1).
Revenues from EA’s digital services hit $429m – up 27 per cent compared to the same period the year before.
This is a big year for us [on PC],” said EA CFO Eric Brown. The online part of our business is growing as much as 60 percent year over year.
In terms of distribution, the way we look at a lot what’s happening in the future is, we’ve got probably a billion PCs out there in the world. Very rapidly the PC is becoming the largest gaming platform in the world, just not in a packaged-good product.”
EA Sports boss Peter Moore recently admitted that the publisher would no longer be releasing boxed PC versions of its sports products.