EA Talks About Battlefield Franchise

EA's CFO Blake Jorgensen says "You want to be really careful that you don't destroy the franchise."

During the UBS Global Technology Conference this week CFO Blake Jorgensen was asked by an analyst if Battlefield could be annualized franchise. He responded saying "The challenges are you’ve got to most likely do it out of two studios because it’s hard, it’s a two-year project," Jorgensen said. "Battlefield takes us about two years to develop and so you want to make sure that you're sharing talent across studios, so you keep core talent of the product and the experience for the consumer there."

Jorgensen spoke how annualizing a franchise, has issues with one of them being making every new entry in the series different than its predecessor.

"You also want to be really careful that you don’t destroy the franchise along the way. You've got to make it exciting and different, but at the same time you want to make sure you maintain a great franchise," Jorgensen said.

Lastly Jorgesen said that releasing a new Battlefield game every year would potentially hurt ongoing digital content sales.

"Battlefield is a product that doesn’t just sell once; it sells for 24 months associated with not just Battlefield, but all the additional Battlefield Premium activities that the consumer wants," he said. "So you’ve got to be careful that you don’t destroy some of that tail that is on the Battlefield product."

Despite all that Jorgensen said, he explained that EA is still interested in looking at ways to grow the Battlefield business.