"JoAnne65;c-16295125" wrote:
"TheGoodOldGamer;c-16294989" wrote:
Saw this on Twitter this morning:
https://twitter.com/EA/status/958761839206133760
What is FY 18Q3..? (I'm not surprised by the way, Rodiek already stated Sims 4 had a rocky start)
Fiscal year 18, quarter 3.
The fiscal year basically just means EA determines for themselves what counts as a year and has a point where they start cranking out numbers on what they earned in the past year. For some companies it aligns perfectly with a normal year on December 31st, some others count the first friday in January as the end of the fiscal year (if I remember correct, anyways), and some others might consider something like June 23rd the "New years" of their fiscal year. It's not a traditional New Year, but rather EA might consider January 10th the end of 2017 due to how their company operates. The fiscal year is always named after the year it ENDS in, so fiscal year 18 implies their fiscal year
did recently end in January.
Quarter 3 would be the third quarter, and I'm actually glad you picked up on that because it potentially downplays that statistic even more. It explicitly states only the third quarter has seen this boost. If we go off the assumption their fiscal year ended in January (since I have no definite proof but that seems to align with everything I know about fiscal years), then this means their quarters started one month later than usual. Quarter 3 would then be the months of August, September and October.
That doesn't seem right because they hardly release anything in August, September or October. Have ANY of the years Sims 4 has developed for released major packs in those months? It's also possible that even though it ended this January, it ended on January 1st, in which case we'd have the more traditional quarter of July, August and September.
In either case, Q3 would be one of their least active quarters regardless. It basically means the Stuff packs of those quarters saw a 35% sales increase over past years. One might argue that this can be used as a reasonable sample to represent sales increases of all packs since a 35% increase in a humble stuff pack must speak for something, but it's also odd that the data makes an effort to explicitly state it's just Q3 that saw such increases. Q4 would be the quarter that releases Expansion Packs while Q1 and Q2 traditionally release Game Packs.
Perhaps the thing to take away is....as I said, percentages are more flattering when you have nothing to begin with. If my company sells 10 products in an entire year and this year I sold 15, I can tell people my company saw a whopping 50% growth in sales. That they've more or less cherrypicked their LEAST active quarter and brag about 35% growth is probably very telling that the others aren't seeing this level of growth. Sure, the community is probably seeing growth all the same (I doubt these random forgettable stuff packs in Q3 would see such growth if the community wasn't growing), but
overall it's likely a far cry from 35% year over year for the entire game at all times.
EDIT: What's got me curious is the comment "
The Sims™ 4 player base grew more than 35% year-over-year and delivered the highest performing expansion pack to date during the quarter." The wording there is strange. To me it implies the Expansion released during Q3, but that makes no sense. If they're going by the system where their fiscal year ended in 2018 so it's fiscal year 2018, we're in January, so it's impossible for Cats and Dogs to land in Q3. Either I'm misunderstanding something, he was simply saying as an additional caveat unrelated the the 35% year-over-year portion that Cats and Dogs sold better than any other expansion pack to date, that Cats and Dogs outperformed all other EA expansions of it's economic quarter, or he's referring to whatever released during Q3 as an "expansion pack."
I think either I'm misunderstanding something or Cats and Dogs selling better than other expansions was simply an additional caveat and wasn't meant to sound like Cats and Dogs was in Q3. Probably the latter because it would make sense in the sense that for them, Q4 (the one with Cats and Dogs in it) probably just ended, so he probably meant
that quarter they just finished rather than Q3 from the previous comments.
Could also be that he's referring to their console release. Wasn't that in Q3? Wouldn't really be a surprise though if the console release beat former expansion sales, so would be kind of a weird thing to praise the game for.
