EA's quarterly shareholder earnings call reveals that new installments in the Mass Effect, Titanfall and Battlefield franchises are expected to release before March 2017.

As 2016 gets underway, there are plenty of big-name titles that we know are in development (like Mass Effect Andromeda), but currently don't have an official release date. Now, a quarterly shareholder report from EA has revealed that some new instalments in the publisher's biggest franchises and scheduled to launch sooner rather than later.

Reports like this focus on profits, and as such they tend to use the financial calendar to address a timeline for new releases. The games mentioned in the call were all confirmed to hit retail before the end of the next financial year, which culminates on March 31, 2017.

The biggest news to come from the call is the confirmation that Mass Effect: Andromeda will launch in that timeframe. Despite being announced back in 2012, we've heard very little tangible information about the ongoing development of the title, outside of the occasional rumor or piece of concept art.

It seems likely that EA would be eager to re-launch a massive franchise like Mass Effect in the holiday season rather than the subsequent spring. If that's indeed the case, we could see Andromeda launching before the end of 2016, which would certainly please the fans who've been waiting for another game since Mass Effect 3.

There's also confirmation that we'll see a new Titanfall release before the end of March 2017. Despite lukewarm response to the first game, it was always quite clear that EA wasn't simply going to cut its losses and bring the nascent franchise to an end before it really had a chance to find its feet.

It will be interesting to see just what the series' sophomore effort offers up. Both the original title and EA's most recent FPS effort Star Wars Battlefront have been criticized for their lack of a single-player campaign, so we'll likely be given an idea of whether EA plans to reverse its thinking on the matter.

The call also reasserts that we'll see a new Battlefield game at some point over the next fifteen months. This is no great surprise, as any later launch would mean that the series went without a mainline instalment for three years — something that would be unthinkable for the franchise's greatest rival, Call of Duty.

All in all, it's clear that EA has an attractive selection of releases planned for 2016 and beyond. Furthermore, most of these upcoming titles have been carefully kept under wraps, so we can expect a raft of major reveals for games like Titanfall 2 and Mass Effect: Andromeda in the coming months.

Source: PC Gamer