Mass Effect Andromeda pegged for early 2017 launch, says EA CFO

Mass Effect Andromeda, whose launch date was announced for the holiday quarter of 2016 at E3 2015, will instead follow in 2017 according to remarks from Electronic Arts chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen during a technology conference yesterday.

Speaking with investors during Morgan Stanley's Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, Jorgensen was asked to list the publisher's upcoming non-sports titles. He said Mass Effect Andromeda would launch "in our fourth quarter." EA's fiscal year ends March 31, meaning this game would launch between January and March 2017.

This was Jorgensen's entire answer, for context.

"So, we've got a great year ahead. For the first time I'm trying to tamp down Wall Street expectations than build it up. Good position to be in, I guess. 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 of those are first-person shooters and will be targeted around both the fast, action-driven shooter market, as well as the strategy-driven market in the quarter. We have all our sports games. We have our Mirror's Edge runner game, that's first quarter [this year, on May 24], 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."

In Electronic Arts' most recent earnings call with investors, chief executive officer Andrew Wilson also mentioned a holiday launch window for the next Battlefield game, "and, of course, Mass Effect Andromeda from the team at BioWare will launch later in the fiscal year."

With both Titanfall 2 and Battlefield 5 coming in the fourth quarter, and presumably Battlefield 5 taking on Call of Duty around its traditional November launch, it would make sense for Electronic Arts to push Mass Effect Andromeda into a late winter release the next year. Mass Effect 2 and 3 were both published in the January to March quarter. The original Mass Effect was not, but it was published by Microsoft, a month after Electronic Arts announced it had bought BioWare.

We've followed up with Electronic Arts for clarification on Jorgensen's remarks. Electronic Arts and BioWare have been relatively quiet about Mass Effect Andromeda to date, other than to specify that it will not continue the story of Commander Shepard, the protagonist of the original trilogy.