EA confident about annual bookings, announces new 'Battlefield' title

By Zaheer Kachwala

(Reuters) -Videogame publisher Electronic Arts said it expects to achieve the high end of its annual bookings forecast and unveiled the next installment of its multi-player shooter game "Battlefield" at its investor day conference on Tuesday.

The new title will mark a return to the modern-day setting, after three consecutive games set in different time periods, competing with Activision Blizzard's best-selling "Call of Duty" franchise.

EA's bet on the more-than-two-decades-old franchise comes as consumers have cut back on discretionary spending in the past year, choosing instead to stick with popular games as stubborn inflation weighed on budgets.

In July, EA announced it expects fiscal 2025 bookings between $7.30 billion and $7.70 billion.

EA's American football titles will record $1 billion in net bookings in fiscal year 2025, CFO Stuart Canfield said during the presentation.

The company also announced an "EA Sports" app to capitalize on the loyal audiences of its sports titles such as "EA FC", "Madden NFL" and the newly released "College Football". The app will act as a social platform that combines sports content, messaging and gaming, all centered on global football, it said.

Additionally, EA announced it is partnering with Amazon's MGM Studios to produce a film based on its simulation role-playing game, "The Sims", adding that it expects to double its annual bookings for the game in the next five years.

The global success of Sony's "The Last of Us" television series last year has spurred Hollywood studios and gaming publishers to green-light film and TV adaptations of popular videogame intellectual properties.

The success of these adaptations is not always guaranteed, as evidenced by the recent box office disappointment of the film based on Take-Two Interactive's "Borderlands", which released to poor critical reviews last month.

The film grossed over $32 million in worldwide box office revenue against its estimated budget of around $115 million, according to data from film website IMDb.

(Reporting by Zaheer Kachwala in Bengaluru; Editing by Janane Venkatraman and Alan Barona)