In their annual financial report, EA have revealed that Battlefield Premium, their subscription service that nets you DLC and a bunch of camo skins for your soldiers, among a few other things, has 1.3 million subscribers. That’s after just two months of being live, which makes it a mighty impressive feat.
Compare that to Call of Duty: Elite, Activision’s equivalent for their behemoth of an FPS, which announced 2 million subscribers recently, (although 10 million registered)and things are looking pretty healthy for EA’s competitor. That’s after a year of Elite being live, which means that Battlefield Premium is playing a hell of a catchup game.
What it suggests is that Battlefield and CoD’s hardcore audience, the kind of people that will lay down upwards of £30 a year for the game they love, aren’t all that dissimilar in size. The discrepancy comes from those who pick it up because it’s the big holiday blockbuster, and it’s going to be what everyone’s talking about. In that arena, CoD is still by far the king, as evidenced by the 6.5 million sales of MW3 on day one, compared to 5 million for the week from Battlefield.
Either way, it should be pretty interesting when they go up against one another again, probably in Christmas of next year, if the Battlefield 4 beta hinted at in Medal of Honour: Warfighter preorders is anything to go by.