EA’s stock prices take a fairly hefty 18% drop today, erasing about $6 billion of the company’s $30 billion evaluation. That’s four times the total market cap of Ubisoft.
The reason for this sharp decline is that EA had to change its financial forecast, revising its expected bookings for this quarter from $2.4 billion – $2.55 billion down to a paltry $2.215 billion. And yes, I was being sarcastic about the amount. For the coming year, it’s now expecting about $0.5 billion less. There were quite a few reasons for this, the biggest being that the company’s microtransactions, which usually see a double-digit growth, are actually expected to shrink by single digits.
“EA’s initial guidance for fiscal year 2025 anticipated mid-single-digit growth in live services net bookings . However, the company now projects a mid-single-digit decline, with Global Football accounting for the majority of the change.” reads the official press release.
Leading the charge for the declining microtransactions is FC 25 which the company noted lost its momentum quite quickly, and “As a result, EA revises its outlook for Global Football to end the fiscal year down mid-single-digit at the midpoint of the new outlook.”
EA also specifically pointed at Dragon Age: The Veilguard as underperforming, stating that it “engaged approximately 1.5 million players” thus far. The wording was very specific since the game is also available on EA’s subscription service. According to EA, this is roughly 50% less than they were expecting.
“ During Q3, we continued to deliver high-quality games and experiences across our portfolio; however, Dragon Age and EA SPORTS FC 25 underperformed our net bookings expectations,” said Andrew Wilson, CEO of EA. “This month, our teams delivered a comprehensive gameplay refresh in addition to our annual Team of the Year update in FC 25; positive player feedback and early results are encouraging. We remain confident in our long-term strategy and expect a return to growth in FY26, as we execute against our pipeline.”
While 1.5 million people is a lot of humans, for a game with such a lengthy, troubled development that undoubtedly cost a small fortune it’s obviously not good enough.
As a result, it looks like Dragon Age’s support has been wrapped up as well. The latest patch notes conclude with “Dareth shiral!” which means ‘farewell‘, or ‘safe journey‘ in the game’s Elvish language. While it could just be a fun little detail, it does sound more like the Dragon Age team is signing off and moving on, although some people have feared that it’s a goodbye from BioWare as a whole. While that seems unlikely at the moment, it’s also a very understandable fear – BioWare hasn’t exactly been doing well lately.
I did actually play around 20 hours of The Veilguard, and honestly it was decent. It suffers from some seriously mixed writing quality – the character writing is especially problematic in places – but the game os overall quite fun. That said, it really wasn’t anything exceptional and certainly not good enough to warrant the long development time.