Earlier this month Marchex announced it would be splitting into two companies, with Marchex becoming a pure play mobile advertising company and Archeo focusing on a premium domain and advertising marketplace.
With the news came the announcement of the company’s top 500 domain sales (PDF), one of which included the sale of Battlefield.com to Electronic Arts for $80,000 USD.
A number of bloggers and tech journalists wrote about the news, with blogs like Domain Name Wire digging into the historical sales to learn which companies plunked down cash to acquire names. As Andrew Allemann points out, several paid top dollar. Glam Network dropped $90,000 for foodie.com, while Google shelled out $100,000 for Chromium.org and $40,000 for HotPot.com.
Electronic Arts has invested a lot of money into its Battlefield franchise and its domain report card shows it has succeeded in the online arena.
In June 2011, EA acquired Battlefield.net for an undisclosed amount of cash.
The company also owns other matching names in the video game series like battlefield2.com (WHOIS), battlefield3.com (WHOIS), battlefield1942.com (WHOIS), battlefield2142.com (WHOIS), battlefieldheroes.com (WHOIS), and battlefield1943.com (WHOIS).
It’s already been reported that the franchise isn’t ending at Battlefield 3 with talk of Battlefield 4 already swirling around the internet.
Perhaps though, Battlefield will see new releases to rival Activision’s Modern Warfare for years to come.
EA currently owns names all the way up to Battlefield9.com according to WHOIS records.
That’s right, Electronic Arts owns battlefield4.com (WHOIS), battlefield5.com (WHOIS), battlefield6.com (WHOIS), battlefield7.com (WHOIS) and even battlefield8.com (WHOIS).
While one might say owning all these names may be nothing more than EA protecting its intellectual property, one could also speculate that EA has long term plans going far beyond Battlefield 4.