EA has come out and defended the sales performance of Star Wars Battlefront after US retailer GameStop previously claimed that the game was a number of big titles which sold less than expected.
GameStop executive Tony Bartel had said that Star Wars Battlefront “fell short of expectations” with regards to the games sales. He revealed that Battlefront was one of three big games which had sold less than the retailer had originally anticipated, with the other two being Halo 5 and Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate. He added that as it got closer to releases, those high sale expectations diminished and still “failed to hit those lowered expectations.”
However EA’s COO Peter Moore has spoken up, stating that the company stand by their estimations that 13 million copies of Battlefront will be sold by the end of March 2016.
“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,” Moore explained. “So from our perspective I’m here to reaffirm our guidance of 13m 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.”