EA COO Peter Moore has defended the sales figures of Star Wars Battlefront after claims from a major retailer that the game fell short of expectations. GameStop COO Tony Bartel said in a previous statement last week that “EA’s Star Wars Battlefront fell short of expectations” but added that he wasn’t “going to quantify it in actual number, but we had high expectations that diminished somewhat as it got closer, and then it failed to hit those lowered expectations.”
Moore, however, responded to the comments made by Bartel at the Credit Suisse Technology Conference, saying that the sales numbers are exactly what EA expected.
The comments were interesting and little bit of a surprise to us particularly as the CFO in the call then started to correct the COO as the call went on. So from our perspective I’m here to reaffirm our guidance of 13 million units sold in for the fiscal year.
There is no weakness that is perceptible yet in the title and I want everybody understand that based on where we think this title is and based on the marketing beats ahead of us in particular the movie launch over the next two weeks we feel very comfortable we’re going to hit the guidance that we’ve given analysts, investors and Wall Street alike.
Regardless of just how well Star Wars Battlefront is (or isn’t) doing at retail still remains unclear to the majority of us, though – EA haven’t released figures for how many of those 13 million copies sold to retailers have actually been sold on to customers, so we’ll just have to wait and see.