Sixty million. That's how many combined PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles are out in the wild, according to EA CFO Blake Jorgensen, revealing that the sales of new generation consoles are in good shape.
This is a 5-million increase from the estimated 55 million console sales that he had predicted at the end of 2015.
The figure was revealed at a Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference on Monday when discussing virtual reality, using it to provide context as to why EA isn't jumping on board the VR bandwagon since the tech is still unproven.
Jorgensen noted that until the demand for VR grows so that it rivals the 60 million current-gen and 150 million plus last-gen console markets, then there is no impetus for EA, or similar companies, to consider investing the $50 to $100 million required to develop a full-blown VR game. When it does, however, Jorgensen noted that EA is already capable of producing the content for relevant devices since it has consolidated its game engine and development processes.
He went on to tease that EA is working on smaller, "vignette"-style VR games, though he declined to go into further detail.
Additionally, Jorgensen revealed during the presentation that 25 percent of all EA sales are now full-game downloads, up from the 20 percent figure disclosed by the company last November. He noted that this figure comes despite there being variance in bandwith speeds and where people are in the world.
"We want the consumer to decide," he explained. "We have great retailer partners; we want to continue to maintain those great retail partners. And they perform a lot of discovery and marketing services for us. We believe there is a world where the retail partners are always going to be around."
"But also a lot of consumers, just like music and books and movies and TV have adopted the way to download digitally is ultimately the way of the future. We try to make sure we're available in any place where people want to buy and consume games."
