EA's Ultimate Team earning around $650 million a year "The extra content business is $1.3 billion a year. Half of that is roughly our Ultimate Team business"

Matthew Handrahan Editor-in-Chief Wednesday 2nd March 2016 Share this article Share

Companies in this article Electronic Arts

The Ultimate Team modes in EA's FIFA, Madden and NHL franchises are now earning around $650 million in annual revenue - half of all sales generated by the extra digital content released to accompany the publisher's games.

Speaking at a Morgan Stanley investor conference, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen detailed the role of digital content and commerce in the improving the company's performance. Jorgensen broke the digital side of EA's business into discrete parts, of which he considered extra content and DLC the most important.

"We've been a leader in driving digital extra content for games, which really drives the profitability of this business," he said. That extra content includes products like a Season Pass for Star Wars Battlefront, say, or map-packs for the Battlefield series, but the biggest contributor - by far - is Ultimate Team.

First introduced with the long-running FIFA series, Ultimate Team is now a key part of the Madden and NFL franchises, too. A retrospective glance back at the EA's financial reports reveals clear indicators of rapid growth, but the company has generally presented that information in terms of percentages - 82 per cent year-on-year in at the end of calendar 2014, for example, or 64 per cent year-on-year in Q2 of the current fiscal year.

For Morgan Stanley's investors, though Jorgensen was more forthcoming about just how valuable Ultimate Team has become to EA's digital business. "The extra content business is a billion-three [$1.3 billion] a year," he said. "Half of that is roughly our Ultimate Team business."

That's equivalent to $650 million in annual revenue, in addition to the revenue generated from units sales of the full games. Assessed in the context of the last fiscal year's results, Ultimate Team would account for almost 30 per cent of EA's record $2.23 billion digital revenue.

Jorgensen also revealed that EA's mobile business is now worth $650 million in annual revenue, substantially higher than the record $524 million it earned in the last fiscal year.