Recently, Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:EA) in association with Lucasfilm Ltd. announced that the sequel of the immensely popular action packed game Star Wars Battlefront will be released worldwide on Nov 17, 2017.
Reportedly, Star Wars Battlefront II offers both single player and multiplayer modes. The newly introduced single player campaign option is expected to take the popularity of the game several notches higher.
Released in 2015, Star Wars Battlefront was a huge success for Electronic Arts. The company has sold over 14 million copies of so far. The popularity of the game can be attributed to its stunning visual effects and mind blowing game play. We expect a similar response to Star Wars Battlefront II.
As per Forbes, customers who pre order the game will get “exclusive content” from The Last Jedi. Furthermore, the game will have an offline “Skirmish” option that will enable players to play the game against bots in different modes with their own choice of difficulty settings.
Per Matt Webster, executive producer at Criterion, “In Star Wars Battlefront II, we all wanted to really capture the essence of being heroic and how in Star Wars, anyone can become a hero”.
We believe that Battlefront will benefit greatly from Walt Disney’s ambitious plan to revive the Star Wars franchise. Disney has already announced two more sequels following Force Awakens and three standalone movies to be released over the next few years. Released last December, Rogue One (first standalone movie) was one of the top grossing movies of 2016 with over $1 billion in worldwide box office collections. A couple of days back, the first trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi was unveiled and it has already garnered over 6 million views on YouTube so far. Last Jedi releases in December this year. Holiday gift-giving frenzy combined with the excitement that builds up prior to any Star Wars movie release should boost sales of Battlefront II.
We note that Electronic Arts outperformed the Zacks Toys - Games – Hobbies industry in the last one year. While the stock returned 34.1%, the industry gained 21.8%.
We believe that EA’s digital business will continue to grow in fiscal 2017 and beyond, primarily on the back of a strong mobile business. Moreover, popular franchises and cost optimization initiatives will continue to prove beneficial going forward.
Currently, Electronic Arts carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).
Stocks to Consider
Some of the better-ranked stocks in the broader technology space include Nintendo Co (OTC:NTDOY) , Advantest Corp ATEYY and Square, Inc (NYSE:SQ) , all sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.
Notably, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for Nintendo’s current year improved to 70 cents from 69 cents in the last 30 days.
The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Advantest remained stable at 71 cents over the last 30 days.
Estimates for Square’s current year widened from a loss of 25 cents to a loss of 26 cents over the last 30 days.
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Square, Inc. (SQ): Free Stock Analysis Report
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