Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:EA) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

There’s often very good reason for people to continue playing the previous game. And so I do believe that we brought in new fans through an incredible game experience and incredible marketing, but we also recognize that we still have a meaningful population playing the previous game, and we’re now working very deliberately and diligently to bring those over to FC and continue to grow the base of FC on a go-forward basis.

Stuart Canfield: Yes, Ben, just on phasing, I think you’ve seen a great start. So naturally you’ve seen us pull forward a little bit through Q2 in the first three weeks, which is natural and part of the strategy as we launched FC. We expect Q3 to operate broadly in a similar manner as we progress through both season and the real world and heading into holiday. We expect Q4 will be more of a tougher comp in part because we had the World Cup pickup from players that flow through into Q4. So macro, yes, stronger start, consistent through Q3 and more of a flat consistency around Q4 given the comp on the prior year.

Benjamin Soff: Got it. And then on Apex, can you just talk a little bit more about what resonated with players for Season 18 and some of the drivers you see to generate growth for this franchise over the long-term? Thanks.

Andrew Wilson: Yes. The team continues to develop incredible content. They’re very deeply connected with their fan community. And what we’ve started to see is different types of content, more dynamic content more content that has application across legends versus being legend specific and different chase mechanics inside the game. Again, there’s a deeply committed community, a deeply engaged community and when they come in and see these chase mechanics, it really drives ongoing engagement. And so my expectation is the team will continue to test and learn and continue to innovate and evolve the experience in line with community needs and community demands and community expectations. But what we’ve seen so far is very positive results to the more dynamic nature of the events and the offers that they’ve been pushing into the experience.

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

Operator: Thank you. We’ll take our next question from Eric Handler with ROTH MKM.

Eric Handler: Andrew, now that you’re not shackled with some of the FIFA restrictions that you have on EA FC. I wonder if you could give a little perspective on what the impact was on revenue for sponsorship and advertising or maybe the impact from promotions?

Andrew Wilson: Well, it’s still really early as we think about the future of this franchise. We are just getting started. But as we talked before, our orientation by transitioning to FC was really about how do we work with more partners around the world in a way they want to work with us. And that’s both leagues, teams, players, competitions and commercial partners. It was really about how do we expand the modalities of play inside the game to do new and interesting things for a growing fan base, how to expand engagement opportunities outside the game? How do we really develop FC as a football fan platform, not just an interactive gaming experience and how do we move really, really quickly. We think that with the partner structure that we have now and the many partners that we have around us with the deep connection we have with the community and the investments that we’ve been making in and around development across the entire ecosystem console, PC, mobile, free-to-play and beyond the bounds of the game is that these things will start to manifest over the coming months, over the coming seasons and over the coming years.

Eric Handler: That’s great. And then just as a follow-up, can you maybe talk a little bit about some of the real estate strategies that you’re sort of working through right now?