EA's CEO Andrew Wilson on Q4 2020 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

Tek

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And I guess, Andrew mentioned in his previous comments, it has continued to grow quarter-after-quarter after quarter. It is an incredible team and incredible product and amazing engagement. And so, you can say -- put it all on the Apex, last year, unbelievable benefit, and then the FIFA move of the FUT birthday in the quarter.

Mobile, the way we’ve approached mobile for the year in terms of our guidance is we basically have assumed that mobile titles will stay in soft launch, much longer than they have historically. And so, we have relatively little new mobile growth from new products in the year. Our hope is, is that we can exceed that, but that’s how we’ve built our guidance because we know the mobile industry continues to get harder and harder. And that means people are keeping mobile titles in soft launch for longer and longer to try to tune them.

The good news is that we still have a strong set of mobile titles today that are highly profitable. You look at Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, for example, continues to perform extremely well, things like SimCity continued to perform extremely well. And while we’re not growing dramatically, we’re still extremely profitable across those titles. And our hope is the new titles that we have in the mix, will get out of soft launch faster than we anticipate and possibly help us generate something above what we forecast for the year.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Uerkwitz of Oppenheimer. Your line is open.

Andrew Uerkwitz

One kind of big picture one very near-term, a big picture question. With so many different new platforms to launch on, should we expect sort of the cadence between titles to kind of lengthen and going forward, kind of dig into the catalog and find things that either could be brought back to life or remastered, or how does the broader platform strategy affected -- how should we think about it affecting future game development? And then, my second question, probably is more for Blake. Could you, if you could, give us some color on sort of almost -- has the sports title seen any sort of -- any sort of deterioration at all, relative to the other titles, through the month of April at all, or how should we think about the guidance on a ongoing forward basis of how you’re building sort of resection, no sports, lots of sports? So, maybe any part of the day when you think sports are coming back.

Blake Jorgensen

Yes. Andrew, do you want to start with the first one?

Andrew Wilson

Yes, absolutely. I would say, the strength of Electronic Arts is built on our ability to be platform agnostic. We’ve been able -- throughout our history, we’ve been able to get to platforms with more titles of high quality than most everyone else in the industry. It is a position we’re very proud of and we continue to drive against that. Six or seven years ago, we anticipated that to be many more new platforms we would have to build on over time and that ultimately cloud would also emerge as its own platform across a number of different companies or portals. And part of the reason we moved the organization to a single digital platform, single ID, single commerce, single data, single infrastructure, single security, and we moved the organization to a single engine in Frostbite was in anticipation of this.

So, as these new platforms come online, we’re able to get to them more quickly and more efficiently and at higher quality than maybe our competitors can, who are working on multiple platforms and multiple engines and actually really use our scale to our advantage and our ability to do that. And what you’re seeing from us now is our ability to get to console and new consoles and PC, Steam and Stadia and mobile, and you should expect that we -- and Switch. And you should expect that we will continue to look to deliver great content on any and all new platforms that we think have the ability to reach critical mass of gamers.

 

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