BioWare's Anthem Expected To Sell As Many As 6 Million Copies By March

Major game publishers rarely share unit sales figures or projections publicly, but that happened today when EA announced how many copies it expects BioWare's Anthem to sell right away.

CFO Blake Jorgensen said EA is modeling sales of 5-6 million units by the end of March. Anthem launches on February 15, so this would only represent sales for about a month and a half. Lifetime sales could end up being higher. Jorgensen said the popularity of the recent Anthem demo gives EA confidence that Anthem will perform well commercially when it launches.

Not only that, but management said it expects Anthem to make even more money from its microtransactions, which EA calls "live services." It's too soon to say how lucrative Anthem's live service component might be, however, EA acknowledged.

People who played the Anthem demo discovered placeholder pages for Anthem's microtransactions, with some players expressing concerns about the pricing. EA responded in a Reddit post by saying nothing is decided yet.

"We are iterating on our economy design and balance almost daily, so you're seeing a snapshot of one iteration. This is why we tend to not discuss things like pricing, because it's one of those iterative things that's sure to change frequently right up until the day you play the game," BioWare said.

In other news, EA announced that Battlefield 5 failed to meet the company's sales targets. The game sold 7.3 million copies, and while that it a massive figure that most games will never achieve, it was 1 million units short of EA's expectations.