Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:EA) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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Andrew Wilson: Okay. Great. Let me take the College Football piece, and I’ll hand-off to Stuart to think about FIFA in the quarter. The team is making incredible progress around college football. Again, we have a long history and an incredible legacy around building this great game in terms of the context of American football, in addition to our very, very, very famous and culturally relevant Madden franchise. College football has always played a meaningful part in gameplay in this country. The team is doing an incredible job building out what would be the future of college football. Game players really coming together and really capturing all of the action and pageantry and the difference in college football versus the NFL.

I feel very confident in what the team is doing. We’ve certainly — we’re working through the license situation broadly. And as of now, we’ve got many, if not most, of the schools’ license as part of our licensing platform. And we’ll continue to work with the various governing bodies of the sport in the country and some key third-party partners that we have around how and when to include college athletes themselves into the game, and we’ll work very closely with them. But I’m confident that this will be an incredible reemergence of our college football experience that it will capture all the action and pageantry driven by the schools and all that goes on with the schools and the conduct of this game. And I do believe that we’ll find a place where we can work in lockstep with the athletes for inclusion in the game as well.

Stuart Canfield: And Clay, with regards to specifically your question on FIFA, I think I’ll just frame up first. I think the second successive record quarter for us with the franchise, the growth was across all platforms. We alluded to mobile net bookings almost doubling Q-over-Q. We saw double-digit growth collectively across all forms, full game through Ultimate Team, Mobile and FO4 for one of our most successful quarters in FIFA.

Clay Griffin: That’s great. And just to drill down again. The daily active increases, is that a function of frequency or new player or growth? How should we think about that?

Stuart Canfield: On the daily side, that’s really referencing a couple of pieces. One on the mobile side, in particular, as the team have continued to drive reoccurring frequency in content drops. We used to have a much larger spaced-out live service consideration. Now the teams are bringing much greater frequency and therefore greater engagement by virtue, and you’re also seeing that evolve itself through the bookings and the overall performance of the mobile SKU.

Clay Griffin: Great. Thanks.

Andrew Wilson: One thing I would add there on mobile broadly and on live services broadly is that given that we have this broad portfolio of live services across console, across PC free-to-play, across mobile, we brought in some incredible mobile native talent with our Glu acquisition with Golf Clash. We’re starting to really reconcile how to effectively drive these live services at scale. And that includes both how we build core game mechanics, how we build new modalities of play on top of those core game mechanics, how we drive user acquisition, and how we really build modalities of play and live events on a more regular basis to drive extraordinary retention in our franchises. And what you’re seeing in our football franchise broadly across console, PC free-to-play and mobile and we’re starting to see in the conduct of even the learnings that we’ve had with Apex coming out of Season 17, and what we’re doing in and around mobile, really embedding this great learning that we’ve had as we brought new talent into the organization.

And as we, as an organization, have learned to run these live services at scale, our expectation is this will continue to be a strong tailwind for us as the nature of the industry continues to change, and we operate in this new version of our industry at scale.

Clay Griffin: Great. Thank you.

Katie Burke: Thank you. Operator, next question, please.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Uerkwitz with Jefferies. Your line is open.

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