Development partners EA and DICE have announced that Battlefield 3 has achieved a new record for their biggest launch day sales.
Battlefield 3, a hotly anticipated shooter game, reached 10 million unit sales, according to the companies. While that doesn’t make it the best-selling launch for any video game, it is a milestone achievement for anyone, and for EA it is a much needed boost.
EA, once regarded as the kind of video game publishing, posted quarterly results which showed a 13.3% year-to-year loss. The company’s revenue was $715 million but it spend more than $1 billion, resulting in a net loss of $340 million.
The Battlefield franchise is its ace in the hole in the heavily competitive shooter market, where games like Sony’s Resistance and Killzone, Microsoft’s Halo, and Activision’s Call of Duty eat up a lot of the market share.
EA, whose sports label is largely what helps keep it afloat even during times of turmoil, has done a lot of investing in new content and platforms over the last year. For example, it launched a new digital download service called Origin, and it has invested heavily in new mobile initiatives as well as in Facebook gaming.
Despite the most recent poor quarterly results, due to the success of Battlefield 3, EA has increased its forecast for how it will close out the year. The company now expects as much as $4.2 billion in revenue for its fiscal 2012 year.
