EA have just released their latest earnings report and it seems like Mass Effect: Andromeda was a sales success, despite widespread criticism. In PCGN’s Mass Effect: Andromeda review, I noted its flaws but still had an extremely good time with it. It seems like plenty of other people enjoyed it too.

Look to the future with our list of upcoming PC games.

In EA’s financials, Mass Effect: Andromeda is held up as the title that drove the company’s financials last quarter, referenced multiple times as a significant factor in generating revenue.

“Year-on-year growth was driven by the Mass Effect: Andromeda sales, captured in the quarter and by FIFA,” CFO Blake Jorgensen explains. “Digital net sales were $681 million, a new record for the first quarter, and up $113 million on the year-ago period. The increase reflects strength in live services, together with our mobile business. In addition, Mass Effect: Andromeda was a significant contributor. Full game PC and console downloads generated net sales of $111 million, 32% higher than last year. This was driven by Mass Effect: Andromeda sales captured in the quarter.”

That’s three mentions of the RPG having a big sales impact on the business. While it’s difficult to tell if the game is a financial success, EA certainly seem to be suggesting as much. It’s more surprising that BioWare Montreal have been put on ice after release, then.

As for the future, EA say they’re still focused on Frostbite powering their games. It was suggested that the game engine didn’t play well with RPGs, but there are a dozen new games from EA that are powered by the tech.

“Our industry-leading Frostbite engine is now powering development of a dozen new titles across our portfolio,” CEO Andrew Wilson says. “It is continually engineered alongside our world-class technology platform for games and services, enabling our creative teams to leverage sophisticated data and insights to conceptualise and build the most incredible new experiences for our players. And across the company, research teams like SEED are working in areas like neural networks derived from our data sets, cloud infrastructure to deliver streaming experiences, virtual humans and AI. These concepts will dramatically shape how players interact and experience games over the next five years and beyond.”

Another game powered by Frostbite is BioWare’s upcoming multiplayer shooter, Anthem, which also came up during the chat. Apparently the game will have a “contiguous open-world that is ever-changing and influenced by players.” Whether this means we’ll be affecting an in-game economy, clawing back territory from rivals, or making BioWare’s signature dialogue choices remains to be seen. It could be something else entirely – all we’ve seen so far is combat.