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Posted September 7, 2011 by James Brightman

Battlefield 3 had more than 10 times the number of pre-orders of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 as of July. Today, EA provided an actual pre-order number during the Citi Tech Conference. CFO Eric Brown said that the challenger to Call of Duty has been pre-ordered 1.25 million times.

"To date we have about 1.25 million pre-orders on Battlefield 3, so it's still well ahead of its predecessor title, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, in regards to pre-orders in the same number of weeks until launch. So it's doing very well," Brown said.

Bad Company 2 went on to sell 5 million units and many in the industry are expecting Battlefield 3 to do far better. Part of that will have to do with marketing. EA's been pushing an "aggressive" campaign as far back as April, and the publisher certainly wants to make sure that it takes full advantage of the two weeks it has on the market before Modern Warfare 3 ships.

"We have a pretty extensive campaign planned for Battlefield 3," Brown noted. "We have the advantage of a two-and-a-half week early launch window versus our competitor, and we intend to use that."

Indeed, Brown noted that the marketing campaign for Battlefield 3 is actually larger than the campaign for another very important EA title: Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare's first MMO. Brown is hopeful that EA can still launch SWTOR this calendar year, but it's not impossible that the game could slip into 2012. Brown indicated that a firm release date should be coming later this month or in October. The game's pre-orders are "tracking consistent with our expectations," he said.

James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.