Amid Worries About Single-Player Games, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order Sells Above Expectations

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order has been a sales juggernaut for Electronic Arts. The company announced on an earnings call today that Fallen Order sold significantly beyond the company's expectations, and is now expected to sell 10 million copies by March 31.

EA was previously modeling sales of 6-8 million copies for that time period. EA CFO Blake Jorgensen said the Respawn-developed game has already reached the high end of the original projection, meaning Fallen Order has likely sold upwards of 8 million copies already.

EA management also said these strong sales for Fallen Order represent a "very strong result for a single-player action game."

Similar to other publishers, EA has been criticized for pursuing multiplayer, "live service" games and moving away from single-player experiences. (This was particularly true after the closure of Visceral, when EA said people don't like linear games as much as they used to.) The result for Fallen Order shows that a single-player game can be a sales success.

Fallen Order isn't likely to be as profitable as other EA games, however, as the publisher is paying Disney a royalty fee on game sales, but the extent of this is unknown.

Fallen Order did perform very well, but it still lags behind the multiplayer games Star Wars: Battlefront and Battlefront II, which have combined to sell 33 million copies.

In other EA news, the company announced that it made nearly $1 billion from microtransactions during the last three months of 2019.