The company behind the mega-selling Fifa 17 football game has its Irish subsidiary based in Galway and has some of the most enviable jobs in the multinational sector here, with its quality assurance team engaged in testing the latest games before they go on general release.

Newly-filed accounts for Electronic Arts Ireland Ltd show that numbers employed by the firm in the 53 weeks to April 2 this year increased from 307 to 365.

The accounts also show that in the company’s 2016 fiscal year, the IDA provided employment grants of €496,000 and followed up in June of this year with a further €608,000. Staff costs at the company last year increased from €12.8m to €14.5m.

The growing popularity of the firm’s best selling Fifa series last year contributed to employee numbers increasing. Last year, revenues at the Irish arm of the company increased by 6% to €23.4m.

However, a €2m jump, to €24m, in the administrative expenses incurred by Electronic Arts Ireland resulted in the business slipping into the red to record a modest pre-tax loss of €11,000.

The firm is one of the leading games firms in the world and last year recorded 1.5bn hours played in the first 16 days of release of its Fifa 16 game with 326m matches.

Along with the team testing the firm’s latest games, the Galway base provides support to customers across 16 different languages including English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Hungarian, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Danish, Czech and Slovak.

Further committing the business to Galway, the directors said that in April of this year, the company signed a three-year contract extension for a data centre rental and future payments under the deal will amount to €4.12m.

A breakdown of the firm’s revenues last year show that €15.3m was generated in the EU with the remaining €8.12m in the US. After paying corporate tax of €61,000, the firm recorded post-tax profits of €72m.