EA’s Ultimate Team has become a staple of some of the most popular sports game titles on the market. The Madden , FIFA and NHL franchises all use Ultimate Team, which is the mode that enables players to put together dream teams with cards they earn. Ultimate Team has become an essential and important part of the EA Sports universe.
During the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference this week, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen announced that Ultimate Team mode is worth $800 million in revenue for the company annually. This is up from the $650 million that Jorgensen announced Ultimate Team was worth at the same conference last year. Ultimate Team started out as a mode in FIFA 09, where one million users played the mode. Now the mode has exploded to the point where tournaments are being held with the best Ultimate Teams from players from around the world.
According to Jorgensen, EA are now exploring ways to incorporate Ultimate Team into the company's other titles beyond sports.
"Like Battlefield or Battlefront , our Star Wars game, which are very similar in the depth of play - we can possibly add a similar mechanic to that,” Jorgensen said to the conference.
“We spend a lot of time thinking about it," he said. "Not for tomorrow, but over the next couple of years you're going to see a lot more of that in our portfolio."
The question now becomes how to bring Ultimate Team into games like Battlefield and Star Wars Battlefront . With the robust online capabilities available for those games, it makes creating a mode allowing players to put together squads possible. The problem then becomes how to introduce Ultimate Team and whether it would just be an online feature or if players will be able to play Ultimate Team offline to obtain more cards.
Ultimate Team is a mode that can keep players entertained for months. The drive to obtain special and limited cards is something that players enjoy, which is what EA knows very well. If the company is able to get the mode into other titles, you are looking at a mode that will potentially yield $1 billion in revenue.
EA seems to have major plans for Ultimate Team going forward. For fans, that means more improvements and upgrades for the mode. EA has the right idea.
