During the Morgan Stanley Media, Technology and Telecom Conference, EA’s Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen announced that Mass Effect: Andromeda, otherwise known as Mass Effect 4, will not be available until Q1 of 2017, even though it was previously expected to be released during the holidays of 2016 as it was initially announced at E3 2015.
According to him, “We’ve got a great year ahead. We’ve got our Battlefield first-person shooter game coming in the third quarter, and our third-party title that Respawn, our partner, built, it’s called Titanfall, it’s the second title that they brought into that brand. Both those are first-person shooter and will be targeted around both fast action-driven shooter market as well as the strategy driven market in the quarter. We have all our sports games, we have Mirror’s Edge, a runner game coming out in the first quarter, and then we have Mass Effect, which is a sci-fi action game, in our fourth quarter. So big year ahead and we’re pretty excited.”
What Jorgensen meant when referring to the fourth quarter is the fiscal equivalent, and not the calendar fourth quarter. EA’s financial fourth quarter pertains to the months of January to March. As he explained that there will be new games in the Battlefield and Titanfall series to be released prior to that of Mass Effect: Andromeda, it is understandable that the company is weighing the marketing costs and consequences if they release all three games at a very close time-frame.
After the recent new of Naughty Dog’s Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End’s delay, fans are no longer too surprised that another triple-A game is to slip its deadline. It’s a fact that gamers would rather wait a little longer for a well-polished game than purchase a buggy half-baked one for an earlier release.
On the lighter side of things, Mass Effect: Andromeda is on time for its 10th year Anniversary, November 7, 2017.
