Electronic Arts' exclusive partnership with Disney over Star Wars has generated $3 billion in revenue so far. That's according to CEO Andrew Wilson, who also told investors during last night's earnings call that the publisher has sold 52 million units across its various Star Wars games, including Battlefront and its sequel, Jedi: Fallen Order and Squadrons. Free-to-play mobile offering Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes accounts for $1 billion on its own, according to the Seeking Alpha transcript. EA secured a ten-year deal for exclusive rights to make Star Wars games for console and PC after Disney acquired LucasFilm in 2012. The first title to emerge from this was 2015's Battlefront, but the publisher was already running BioWare-developed MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic. That exclusivity ended recently when LucasFilm Games -- re-established as a separate division by Disney -- signed a deal with Ubisoft to make an open-world Star Wars game. Benchmark Company analyst Mike Hickey asked if the lack of exclusivity meant EA would be producing fewer Star Wars games, to which Wilson responded:
Electronic Arts has secured a licence extension with UEFA, and unveiled a number of projects designed to further solidify FIFA's position as market leader in football games. The publisher has signed a multi-year agreement with the European football association which gives it the exclusive rights to the Champions League, as well as the Europa League and Super Cup. EA took this opportunity to also announce that FIFA will make its debut on Google's Stadia streaming service this year, with FIFA 21 launching on March 17. Stadia is in need of some positive news after Google announced yesterday that it had closed the internal studios responsible for developing exclusive titles, instead focusing on third-party titles and outsourcing its tech to publishers. EA also announced a number of other expansions for the FIFA franchise, including the addition of 15 markets -- including Russia, Poland and Turkey -- to free-to-play PC offering FIFA Online 4.
Apple has indicated that its new advertising tracking restrictions on iOS devices will go into effect nearly a year after they were first unveiled. The company yesterday said that its new requirement that apps get user permission before tracking their data across other apps or sites will go live in its next beta update, with a broad rollout for iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and tvOS 14 in the early spring. Apple said that the average app contains six different data trackers in it, often embedded in the SDKs and APIs that developers use to make the apps in the first palce.