Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

So hi, everyone. So I was expecting a lead in there, but I will go straight into it. Good afternoon. Thanks for joining us today for a conversation with a bunch of the executives from Electronic Arts and concerning the Electronic Art -- EA Play announcements. We'll try something new today. Obviously, we're not in the world that we used to be in, where ordinarily, we'd be down in L.A. holding an event and holding a lot of meetings with many of you, hundreds of you, probably over the course of EA Play and you get to see the games and experience them for yourselves. That's not possible this year, but technology does provide us some alternatives that we can try and so this is one. So we're giving you a rare opportunity to speak with some of our game creators, and we're going to structure it as a Q&A with a panel. I've got a long list of questions, which I've drawn up based on conversations we've been having with you over the last couple of months and because, also, I want to give the panel an opportunity to talk about the long-term prospects for EA. But this is a live event. So we can also take questions from the audience through the event. If you'd like to ask a question, please do through -- do so through the Q&A box located on the webcast console page, and I'll pass it on to the panel. I'll assume you want to ask anonymously. And if we don't get to your question today, reach out to us directly, and we'll certainly find a way of getting back to you. So with me on the panel, we have Andrew Wilson, our CEO; Blake Jorgensen, our COO and CFO; Samantha Ryan, SVP and Group GM; Cam Weber, EVP and Group GM; and Vince Zampella, Group GM SVP. Right. Before we get going and to set exactly the sort of informal tone we'd like to achieve at this event, I have to read this from our legal department. Please note that the presentation is being streamed at ir.ea.com. After the presentation, we'll post an audio replay. Our comments today will include forward-looking statements regarding future events and the future financial performance of the company. Actual events and results may differ materially from our expectations, and we refer you to our most recent Form 10-K for a discussion of risks that could cause these actual results to differ materially from those discussed today. Electronic Arts makes these statements as of today, June 22, 2020, and disclaims any duty to update them.

So with that said, I wanted to start with a question for Andrew, and before we go into EA -- specifics around EA Play announcements and because our audience today are our investors, I was hoping we could talk about how EA thinks about its growth opportunities going forward. Andrew, how would you describe them?

First off, thank you, everyone, for joining us. Thanks, Chris, for putting this together. It's certainly a different way to speak with all of you. So thank you for being here. And before we get started, also, I hope you and your families continue to be safe and healthy. If we are to believe the data that we have seen over the last few days, we are anything but through the pandemic. There's argument whether we're in the first wave or the second wave, but our sincere hope is that all of you are safe and healthy and continue to be well as we enter the summer, and your kids are likely at home and now you are thinking about the world without summer camps, as we are, which is a whole new challenge that is even more complex than homeschooling, as it turns out. So again, we've just come off the back of the EA Play, and I think we're going to talk a little bit about -- a little bit more about that later on. It was a great EA Play for us. Viewership was up meaningfully over last year. The reality is we had an action-packed hour or so. We could have had 3 or 4 hours. We had a lot more games that we opted to leave for other conversations with our community. We're happy to talk about those today, but it was a really, really strong showing for us. In a lead up, we had the #1 and #2 trending videos on YouTube with Star Wars: Squadrons, and Madden, which was spectacular. It's unusual for a company to have both the #1 and the #2 spot across all of YouTube, but we did in the lead-up to EA Play. And our tweet around Skate, and you will likely have seen much of this, was the most successful tweet ever in EA history. So certainly, there is a lot of demand for that product. And we're excited about what that can be, and we may get into that a little bit later on today as well. So near term, we feel very good. On a longer-term basis, we really are driving the business from the 3 core vectors: One, amazing games and content. At the end of the day, we're in the entertainment industry. And to the extent that we can build spectacular games and content, that will form the foundation of everything we do. Second is about growing the business through live services. And there's really kind of 3 core buckets of live services, and we'll talk about this a little bit today. But one is how do we connect players to each other. Two is how do we connect players to the games that we make and the experiences they love. And three is how do we take the combination of those 2 things and the creative, innovative teams in Electronic Arts and the analytics and data teams and create really, really strong, new and extended and enhanced experiences based on our games that continue to deliver fun and enjoyment for many months and often many years to come. And the third is, of course, how we can expand our reach, how we can reach players where they are and grow audience. And so today, as we go through and we've got some great people on the call here today for you to speak with, we will talk about great games. We will talk about growing with live services, and we will talk about expanding our reach. On a slightly longer-term time horizon, there are another couple of vectors that we think will drive growth. You've heard us talk about Atlas. This is our ability to take our services and our expertise and share that with the world at large, both our communities and other developers and publishers in the industry. And you'll start to see more and more of that from us. And the other vector, of course, is how can we take the expertise that we have and apply that to other industries and other markets and other categories. And when you think about a world where there's 2 very strong secular tailwinds, one, which is social interaction and communication is moving from physical to digital, COVID has actually driven that in a meaningful way and that entertainment is moving from linear to interactive, the skills and capabilities and experience that we have over 40 years in this industry has brought application to a great many different industries. And you should think about the future of the consumption of sport. You should think about the future of consumption of entertainment. You should think about how we engage players throughout their daily lives with other things that are interesting to them that are [ joined ] their gaming experience. One of those things might be betting. And so these are in a longer-term time horizon, but we have a number of projects incubating inside the company right now as we think about that on that 5-year-plus time horizon. So if you think about today and we think about that first point, great games and content, in calendar year 2019, we shipped 8 AAA games including Madden and FIFA and Apex Legends and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. These were some of the greatest games our industry saw, and I saw one metric that suggested that we had shipped more games than many of our competitors combined. And we did that with tremendous quality and strong operational excellence. And we feel really good about the momentum we're building inside of our studios. At EA Play, we talked about new games. We talked about Star Wars: Squadrons. You heard reference to a team at drag -- a team at BioWare working on the new Dragon Age. But in addition to that, we also believe we continue to grow our existing games. Madden just had its biggest year yet, and we believe we have strong momentum to continue growing that business off the back of the announcement around a much bigger and broader partnership with the NFL. Sims just had its biggest year since launch, and I know Samantha will be able to talk a little bit more about all of the ways we think we'll continue to engage that community. And it was FIFA, which has the best part of 100 million people engaging in it. It's already a really big business, but when you think about fandom for football or soccer around the world is in excess of 2 billion people or 2 billion fans, the opportunity there is still tremendous for us. And as I think about it across our portfolio, our ability to continue this momentum of high-quality operational excellence, growing our biggest games and delivering new IP, I feel like we're in a really, really good position on a go-forward basis.

Thanks, Andrew. I want to move over to Cam actually because Cam's responsible for all of our sports titles. And when we talk about our sports titles, we -- because they happen every year, we don't spend as much time on them, I think, as it's justified by just how big they are. And when we do, we tend to be very focused on the live services, which has obviously been tremendously powerful growth drivers for the company. So I was wondering, Cam, if you could talk briefly about what you're doing to grow the core games and how you think about how that's evolving?

Yes. Sure. I mean, we invest a lot in the core authenticity of our games every year but also adding innovative new ways to play on top of that. FIFA and Madden both have huge development teams behind them. I think we have over 400 developers that touch Madden every year. We have many more in that also that work on FIFA. Plus developers, artists, talent like the commentators, motion capture and so on. I think we kind of think we start with the gameplay. So the action on the field or on the pitch, and each franchise has a large core gameplay team filled with specialists and experts from each floor that pour their hearts into those gameplay engines each year. People don't realize the level of complexity that goes into the interaction that happens in a sports game. The level of AI, physics, animation, interaction, it's incredibly complex, and we make hundreds of improvements every year to our core gameplay experiences in each game. And then on top of the gameplay experience, we have all of the modes. And of course, many of these modes are so big and there's so many of them that we think of Madden and FIFA as platforms more than games. We have individual game modes that are effectively games in their own right, and plenty of people will play all through the year in just one mode, whether that's ultimate team career mode, a franchise mode player or one of the other modes in the game. They find there's enough entertainment and depth there to keep them engaged almost year round. So when we launch a new mode like Volta, or Superstar KO that we launched last year at NFL Kickoff, it's like launching effectively a small game within the game. And these modes will also drive growth because they satisfy different motivations for new types of players. For example, Volta, World of CHEL that we launched at NHL, Superstar KO last year, and you'll see more coming this year. Particularly, these are interesting because in the past, we've really focused on that authentic full movie experience, like just having the professional sport leagues and clubs and everything that happens in a pro stadium. But these other modes have kind of departed from this, and they have different environments. They focus on less players on each side, vanity, lifestyle, self-expression, created avatars and teamwork against other user-controlled avatars. And so it's a play style that's designed to be more fun and quicker to get into but also better suited to social play. And you're going to see more of that in this year's games. But when we add new modes, we certainly don't forget about adding innovation to the core traditional modes as well. So we have so many players that play those core modes as well. So as you can see, I mean, we have so -- there's a lot of work. We have so much required in terms of like servicing every area of the game and keeping our players happy, and we have multiple groups of players to satisfy every year.

And so these new modes, as you conceive of the new modes and as you think about what you want to put into them and who you want to appeal to, how do you think about the player audience and what they are looking for from a sports game or maybe even from sports in general?

Yes. I mean, people play games for different reasons: competition, social connection, self-expression, escape. If you want your game to appeal to more people, you need to appeal to more motivations for players. And so -- and you think of the broader context. The way that people are consuming sports in the real world is changing. And meanwhile, gamers, the expectations of gamers are changing as well. So if we talk about sports first, Gen Z consumes sport differently. They follow the star more than the teams. They watch you in bite-size chunks, focused on exciting moments and highlights rather than sitting down for a whole game. And they do so digitally rather than over linear broadcast TV. There's also multitasking that they do, using multiple screens to engage with sports across several media simultaneously. And they also are just as interested in what their favorite athletes are doing off the field as what they're doing on the field at any given time. So it's really changed a lot. Our lead partners recognize this, and they're building up their online offerings, giving sports fans more choice. They're creating smaller chunks of content in different ways to follow their favorite teams and star players, and they're expanding their presence across social media. They're even evolving the rules of the sports to shorten the life of games for a little more exciting and more entertaining experiences so that players can enjoy watching it on the field. And meanwhile, gaming is changing as well. So the player base is expanding. We're going to see 3.2 billion gamers over the -- in the next 5 years. Gen Z players expect social connection and self-expression, and we have new technology opening up opportunities to reach more people with more games, more services and new business models. And EA Sports, we're kind of at the center of both gaming and sports, and all of this changed. So we have a unique opportunity to be the element that connects it all together. Our mission is to grow the love of sports with the games and services that we can provide. And we're like a portal for younger fans and a way for the leagues to find their future fans.

Okay. Samantha, so that was some really interesting stuff about demographics and changing demographics and how that drives Cam's thinking about new games. Does it drive your thinking as well? If you think of -- actually, for the audience, I should say that Samantha is responsible for a large number of the new games that we've recently launched and that are in development. So BioWare reports to Samantha, Star Wars: Squadrons and Motive reports to Samantha and a bunch of others as well. But -- so sorry, Sam. But back to you. I mean, how do you think about demographics and how it's driving your game development in your studios?

Yes. Absolutely. We're constantly thinking about what our players want, and we think about the new generation of players, they've really grown up in a world where technology is completely different than what I grew up with, and you have to respect that. We have to give them as much autonomy and self-expression as they can possibly want. They want to socially share as well. When you think about it from a socio-cultural perspective, they often refer to first, second and third places where home is a person's first space. A second space is usually work or school, and a third space is where people hang out with their friends, their communal spaces. And in the past, that communal third space was physical. But in today's world, that communal third space is just as likely to be digital. And in fact, with the situation the world is in right now, it's absolutely digital. We need to make those spaces as accessible as we possibly can to our folks, and we need to remove any barriers, no barriers to accessibility with that space. And we think that, that's really -- it's going to drive growth. It is driving growth, and it's driving new types of games as well in our portfolio.

Okay. Vince, I mean, you've just launched 2 amazing games. So maybe this is a bad time to ask you about what new games you might have coming. It seems slightly unfair, but maybe you could comment as well on how you think about it from a response perspective.

Well, if you looked at the kind of history of Respawn, I think we've shown -- we kind of started out with Titanfall. We did Titanfall 2. We added Apex. We added another team to do Jedi. We added another team to do Medal of Honor. We have a lot of things kind of in the works now in small incubation teams. So we're kind of constantly growing what Apex has been over the last 10 years. It's been a good solid ramp of productivity. I like to explore lots of new games. So we'll see where that goes. Watch this space.

Fair enough. Fair enough. So Star Wars: Squadron, obviously, EA Play, let's get to that. And Samantha, how did you and your team arrive at that as the next title to work on? Where did that come from?

Yes. It's an awesome story because it's a very ground up, fan-driven initiative. After the team at Motive finished work on Battlefront II, a small group came together that were super passionate Star Wars fans, and they had this idea of being inspired by the past and doing something that was really core focused for Star Wars fans who wanted to live out that fantasy of being a pilot. And they came to us, they pitched it and we said, "That sounds amazing." It's something that we know our players have been asking for. They wanted something different. They wanted something deep. They wanted something that was the pilot fantasy inspired by all the amazing games from the past that many of us grew up on. And so that was an important initiative for us as a company as well because we're doing more than we ever have in the past to really stay connected to our fans and to listen to our fans, and we actually think that this approach can drive growth and can inspire us to do things that perhaps we wouldn't have thought of before. But if you look at the response to Squadrons, it's been amazing, and the team is just super happy and is working so hard now to finish up the game and get it out to fans in October.

And Command & Conquer is one of yours as well, which is fan-driven as well, right?

Yes. Absolutely. That was a unique one. We did it in partnership with fans. We brought them in very early. We have even talked about, we've released the source code in order to support the mod community. Again, it's another example of really trying to do our best to listen to our players. And then, of course, there is Skate, which was the #1 trending topic in the U.S. on Twitter within the first few hours, which is amazing. All of the team, Darren and Kaz, like we're all just blown away by the fan response. And it has -- I think the guys have said almost 5 million views on Twitter alone in the first 24 hours, a very light thread across EA, and we're just so excited to embark on that journey. We're very early but we believe there's just a ton of possibility there, and we want to go on that journey with our players.

That's awesome. It's fantastic to see a reaction like that. Blake, a quick question for you, following on from Samantha's comment about Star Wars: Squadrons as well. A lot of investors will want to scale it in their models. How to -- can you help them think about how to model that? How big can that game be?

Yes. Let me first start by saying since I arrived at the company, I have been a proponent of Skate and being a public company, and I'm not getting any credit, I shouldn't get any credit for it, but it is amazing to see the number of people that got excited about it because I -- it was one of my favorite games growing up. So with that, we're not calling out exactly the units. And you can trust that we're trying to really gauge what the fans think about the game and we really excited about what we heard last week. We have roughly in our guidance, for some of the titles, Command & Conquer and Medal of Honor and ones we have not yet announced, plus the Star Wars probably roughly $150 million. I would hope we see Star Wars do much better than that, but it's a very unique game and specific, but it does play to the Star Wars core fan base, and we hope that it shows a lot of success in the fall. And we know that there really aren't any other games like it coming. And so it should be -- the timing should be fantastic. And the team has done an incredible job on it.

Awesome. Thanks. Andrew, so another Star Wars game that people weren't expecting. Where do we go with Star Wars from here?

Well, I think up is my hope, up and to the right. But I would say, again, I think we have a tremendous relationship with Disney. We have a tremendous relationship with Lucas Arts. We have a long-standing relationship with them, going all the way back to Star Wars: The Old Republic that we launched in 2011. Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes has been an extraordinarily successful mobile game and continues to be successful and continues to engage a huge fan base. We've got a couple of Battlefront games that together have sold -- I think, we're in and around 35 million units of that. So that's a really big property; Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order with over 10 million units, and now Star Wars: Squadrons, which, again, as Blake points out, is going after a very particular Star Wars fan motivation, the kind of the pilot fantasy, but the response has been really, really strong, and we're hopeful for that. So we've had success in first-person shooters, in RPGs and action adventure, MMORPGs in mobile. And I believe we're going to have success in Squadrons as well. And so again, I think that we're going to double down on that partnership. Disney continue to be very, very committed to the IP and to the [ canon ] that can either create new content. We're seeing new generations come into that content. I'm experiencing that with my 5-year-old, my 8-year-old now, who have watched all 9 movies over and over again and every other piece of content that's in Disney+. So I think we've got the combination of great IP, great development expertise and experience and success from us across the genres, across platforms, across business models, and we've got new generations coming to the IP all the time. So our expectation is we think there continues to be a really, really strong opportunity in and around that relationship and that IP going forward.

Yes. And I might add, Vince's team on Jedi: Fallen Order built an incredible partnership with Lucas, and we're able to build new characters and content that have never been seen, which is rare in the history of Star Wars. And it just shows, I think, the creative partnership that we've built, and credit to Vince and Stag and the team. I mean, they're just -- and they've built a foundation of things that we could do there for many years to come.

So Cam, just a quick one, back to you before we move on to live services. But you talked about launching games within games, right, these new modes. Have you considered launching new standalone games as well within the sports genre?

Yes. We're looking a little further ahead into the future. We definitely do expect to increase the number of sports games we launch each year. We have a number of new games in incubation or early pre-production. Some of them are familiar faces, you might remember, but others are completely new. So you'll hear more as we get closer to launch.

Cool. Thanks. Mysterious. I like it. Andrew, you talked about -- can I ask you to expand a bit more on live services? And then I'll ask the others to weigh in as well afterwards. You talked about live services in your opening.

Yes. Of course. And in the opening, I talked about, really, 3 categories of live services that we think about. One is how do we connect players with each other. Two is how do we connect players with the games they love. And three is how do we use the creativity and innovation in our game teams combined with the data and analytics across our platform to build new and interesting event-based services that extend and enhance the experience. And so you've heard us talk about this a lot before. As we've -- as Ken Moss came into the company what is about 7 years ago now, and we really doubled down on our digital platform, ID, commerce, data, infrastructure, security, scalability. The ID component in that was a really, really important one. This wasn't just about logging into our games. This was about building a player-led service that really federated your IDs across your digital life. It brought in Facebook ID, it brought in Microsoft ID, it brought in Sony ID and federated that with an EA ID so that you could maintain your entire social graph inside your games. This is a very meaningful step for us. It's actually the step that meant that we're able to go back to Steam, and we'll talk about this a little bit more later on. But you've seen that we are taking our subscription to Steam. We're taking some of our properties to Steam. The big hurdle that we had to overcome was our ability to unite the communities across EA's PC infrastructure and Valve or Steam's PC infrastructure. And we were able to do that because we've been investing in these kind of player-led connection services. The second thing, of course, is how do we connect you with the games you love. And that's not only about building new games and marketing them to you but ensuring that we can offer you a ways and means to connect with those games anywhere that you want to play, whether that's on console, whether that's on PC, whether that's on mobile with regards to business model, and you've seen us invest a lot in just the user experience and the user interfaces and the underlying connectivity with our games that ensures that you can come together. You take a game like Apex Legends, which has over 70 million players, and the ability for us to build a foundational architecture that allows those players to connect and compete and play together is a really, really important part of our future, particularly as you think about where Samantha is going with Skate. And there's a whole new world that we're going to unlock with Skate that goes well beyond just creating a skateboarding game. But then when you think about what our teams do, the creativity and innovation around building new games, but more importantly, taking the data and analytics we get from across our entire platform experience and using that to build new and interesting ways to extend and enhance experiences for players, what you start to see is Ultimate Team that's over 11 years old and continue to grow; Sims 4, which is over 6 years old and continues to grow; Galaxy of Heroes, which is a number of years old and continues to grow; Apex Legends, where that team continues to build strong connection with their fan base and their player base, and it continues to grow. And as we think about this and as think about developing for the future, our expectation is that the combination of these 3 things will ensure that we can build solid, strong live services with reoccurring value to our players and reoccurring value to our business.

Thanks. Vince, so how does that apply to Apex Legends? And also, I had a question from the audience as well, which is sort of a more specific one, which is like, if you had this year, again, how would you do it differently? So if you could answer both of those.

I mean with Apex, it's taking a team that's traditionally been a box product kind of AAA game studio and shifting it into live service model. I wouldn't say there's anything -- and there's probably little things here and there that we would go back and change, but for the most part, it's been evolving, learning and not making changes too abruptly. I think we had this team that we needed to protect and kind of foster that environment, and we made changes across the team over -- it's been over a year now. We made changes to the structure of the team, kind of figuring out what was our objective, what do we want Apex to be. And we want the balance of -- we want a lot of content for the fans, but we want to also protect the developer's kind of quality of life. So it's where does that balance kind of fall? And I think we've gotten into a good place now. We've got new leadership on the team that really has a great vision. We're driving to it. We've seen 4 quarters of consistent growth. This season was like the biggest since season 1. So again, everything we're doing is working. So I'm pretty happy about that. So I don't know how much I would go back and change.

That's good. And that's great. So maybe I'm going to get Cam then, who, of course, has Ultimate Team. Maybe we could dive into that a bit and how you could -- how -- well, the challenge investors think about with Ultimate Team is it's a huge business. How can we grow a business that's already that big?

Yes. I mean, first of all, I think Andrew covered some of this when he talked about analytics and its sophistication and how we manage our live service. So we get better at optimizing doing what we do and we learn. We learn what works with players and what will engage them. But we also continue to deepen those game experiences in Ultimate Team. The depth of those modes is just getting bigger and bigger every year, along with competitive gaming and how we kind of nurture a grassroots competitive gaming ecosystem that includes competing in-game in Ultimate Team and then going all the way up and qualifying for the bigger tournament. So as players get better and better at our games and they get more competitive in how they like to play, we see deeper and deeper engagement in Ultimate Team. So that continues to happen every year. We're also adding less competitive ways to engage in Ultimate Team. So more ways to play with and against friends, more gameplay challenges against kind of the CPU-controlled components. Other ways to combine the things that you earn into like squads and squad-building challenges and things like that, so you can earn more rewards that way. You can engage in the auction or the transfer market. Some players just engage hour after hour in the transfer markets and the auction houses, trying to acquire the things that they want, and that's super fun and engaging as well. And you do all of these things to help grow and improve your club along the way. So it's something that's deeply engaging. And then we're also looking at broadening the things that you can do, the [indiscernible] to continue to find engaging things for players to do without needing to spend. So we see a lot of players that seems to continue to progress with others. Maybe 85% of [indiscernible] have done so [indiscernible] through your phone. [indiscernible] along the way [indiscernible] more and more players that do want to spend [indiscernible] accelerate that [indiscernible] as they go.

[indiscernible] [Technical Difficulties]

I can't hear you, Chris [indiscernible]

Yes. It sounds like we've got sound issues, Chris.

Yes. I think the system is down and I can't hear [indiscernible]

Thanks. Hi, everyone. While Chris...

[indiscernible]

No. We can't hear you, though, Chris. I think there must be a leak in Chris' house. It sounds like water running. There's nothing like live broadcast, right? Chris, can you hear us or? Sounds like Chris is going to drop off.

Can you hear me now?

I need to take the questions now.

Yes. All right. We just hope there's not a leak in your house, Chris.

No. It just died. For God's...

I was just going to tell everybody how amazing our technology team had done moving people to home and being able to work from home. But obviously, I won't say that now since it's questionable. But we normally use Zoom. So I don't know. That might be. I'll blame it on that. Chris is frozen.

Okay.

So Sam, I'll jump in for Chris while we're waiting for him to be unfrozen. The Sims is the perennial underappreciated growth driver inside the company. We all know inside of EA, it is an amazing machine. Give us a little bit of view on where you think the Sims are going over the next years. And why it is just so fabulous?

Yes. Absolutely. The Sims is 20 years old this year, which is truly amazing. How many franchises have that staying power. And it was really an early harbinger of where the industry was going, these trends towards autonomy and self-expression. It really empowers players to create their own personal story. They can be whatever they want, how -- live however they want, and that's so rare and really precious that we continue to preserve that in a game. We want to be able to players live out whatever life they want. In this time, in today's age, that's even more important. And the amazing thing that we're seeing out of our Sims creators is truly astounding. So we've had 6 consecutive years of growth. We have over 31 million players live to date. We've added 2.7 million in just the last 2 months alone, and that puts our MAU up over 9 million, which is -- it's just really astounding. But when you think about what our players have been able to create, they've created almost 1.6 billion Sims, 600 million Sims households, and they've performed 37 million Sims weddings. They spend over 65 million hours each year looking at our Sims gallery, and they've uploaded 41 million pieces of user-generated content, which is astounding. And we haven't even made that content really super easy for them to create. It's quite burdensome for these creators to go out and figure out how to do this. Imagine, over time, if we could make this easier for them, the kind of opportunity and staying power that this franchise has and the power that it gives to our players, it's pretty amazing.

Well, and I think also your teams and/or the sales team interaction with the players is amazing, and they try to build what the players want. And it's probably one of the secret sauces in the game, right? I mean it is -- they're listening the whole time and trying to pull in and build the content that they really want to play. And then that brings new players in as well.

Absolutely. I remember the first time we did community voting on which packs players wanted and players voted that they wanted a laundry day pack. And some folks were like, what? Like why laundry day? And it turned out to be, for a while, the #1 selling small pack that we had. So we have to listen to our players and what they want, and we're responding as best we can to the flood of information that we get.

That's my favorite of all time. People said simply, my Sims have not been able to wash their clothes for the last 6 years, they need some laundry.

They do. Absolutely.

And Andrew, you talked about growth driver, reaching more people and more geographies on more devices, how are we approaching that at EA that you can help people understand with?

I think it's a great question. Growth comes in many different forms. At a very core, it really comes from our games. So to the extent that we can build great new games that have broad appeal, that's going to grow audience. You take a game like Skate, and while skateboarding in and of itself has tremendous appeal to a huge global audience, there's also kind of another secular trend that's happening inside of our industry around user-generated content in open world and interaction. And for many people, skateboarding isn't just a sport. It unlocks their access to art, culture. If you follow a guy by the name of Nyjah Huston on -- one of the world's greatest skateboarders on Instagram, you will discover he's a young guy started out skateboarding, now he's a fashion icon, an art icon, lives in a big house in Beverly Hills and drives around in a Rolls-Royce. So for many people, you think about skateboarding as a starting point that has appeal, but you start to build in user-generated content exploration and community on top of that, and that expands the opportunity exponentially. And so as we think about our future, we think about growth, a big part of it is choosing games that not only themselves have appeal but can benefit from secular trends in our communities that we think will grow them even beyond our initial expectations. The second, of course, is geography. To the extent that we can enter more meaningfully in new geographies, we, of course, are going to expand our total addressable market. Right now, we've got initiatives where we're pushing into Latin America, where we're pushing into India. And of course, we're doing a lot in Asia across the board. And when you have a property like FIFA, which is the world sport, and you have the depth and breadth of the portfolio that we have, our ability to push into these new markets is very, very strong. And while things in Latin America and India are early, or earlier than they are in Asia, you should expect that on a 5-year-plus time horizon, we think we will make meaningful headway into growing our business in those markets. Then, of course, there's platforms. And we've gone to -- we've been on PlayStation and Microsoft and PC for a long time. You saw us announce during EA Play with a bunch of new titles coming to Switch, with a bunch of new titles coming to Steam. We referenced thinking about the Epic platform, all with a view to keeping our communities together through cross-play and building on that liquidity within our global player base and the engagement that we're able to drive by keeping our global communities together. And then, of course, we have [ business ] models, which expand the opportunity for access to many players, everything from free-to-play through premium, through premium plus live services all the way through subscription. And as we think about our business on that vector, we have our core games that we're going to build to drive appeal and, hopefully, benefit from secular trends like user-generated content that grows our community. We're going to expand into new markets where, right now, we have meaningful opportunity to do so. You're seeing us go to where our players are across every platform that makes sense and you're seeing us offer our content through business models that provide a broad range of access regardless of how players want to engage with us. Mobile, in particular, is a category that kind of spans across all of that. We have PvZ 3 in soft launch. We've talked about having Apex Legends in soft launch by the end of this year. You've heard me talk about 6 or 7 other games in various stages of incubation or production or kind of in finaling phase. We feel very good about our mobile business. Unlike many people in the mobile industry, we've built a very strong and profitable business. We've had great success with products like Simpsons: Tapped Out, and Madden, and Stars Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, and we expect to have ongoing success on a go-forward basis. But when you roll mobile into what are the other growth vectors for us and the double-down focus that we have around that part of our business, we feel very good about our ability to grow and expand our overall gaming audience and grow and expand our business on top of that.

Great. Thank you. Can you hear me now? Am I back?

Yes, we do. You fixed it.

Well, it was an entirely deliberate thing that I did, entirely deliberately and not on accident at all, in which my computer just decided that it is going to reject every single USB device attached to it, including the microphone and the camera and the lot. So I restarted. So here we are. So thank you. So thanks for keeping it going without me. Let's go straight to Cam, I think, and talking about growth strategies. Again, massive business already. How can we grow that further? What can we do?

Well, Andrew talked about platforms and geographies. We've invested in moving all of our sports games over to the Frostbite engine over the last couple of years, and we continue to do that through the portfolio. And the reason that's key is that allows us to get to more platforms more smoothly. So you're seeing FIFA and Madden coming to Steam and Stadia this year, also the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, and we're also opening up new geographies. So some of it's around strategic choices around new licenses. I don't know if people realize, but each license really enables us to include content that's relevant to players in a particular region. So it's a big part of our strategy. We actually have over 400 licenses in our EA SPORTS network. And then we have licenses like the FIFA mark itself that has global appeal. If you actually just look recently, we signed the Copa Libertadores. It's basically the champion league in South America, and that gives console players in Latin America a competition that they live and breathe when they go into FIFA. So that's a big part of our growth strategy there. We added the India Super League recently, which increases the relevance of FIFA mobile there. We also just launched the new version of FIFA Mobile in Korea. It's also live in China, and it's going to go live in Japan in the fall. And the early signs there are really good and the opportunity is really huge. And on mobile, in particular, as a platform, I think we have a lot of growth ahead of us. And we're really going about it in 3 different ways. One, we're optimizing our existing gains by investing in live service capabilities and life cycle management, extending games to new markets and geographies, like I just spoke about with FIFA. We're also finding synergies with our kind of console or HD space and investing in connected progression between mobile and our HD counterparts and our sports franchises. And then third, we're creating some new games, frankly. We're building new games that leverage our licenses and our IP in sports, but allow us to reach new players through mid-core and casual games.

Sounds great. So moving now, that was the big picture of growth strategies. Andrew, could you link the EA Play announcements to that framework that you gave for growth?

Yes. EA Play is just a fraction of what we do. I think that again, when you try and build something that's entertaining for an hour, you don't get to cover all the things. And I hope that we've been able to give a little bit more context and overview today. But even if you unpack EA Play, it really had strong application to the overall growth drivers of our business. So at it's very core, it was about great games, both growing existing games like Madden and FIFA and what new platforms and new generations of technology are going to bring those games but also adding new games like Star Wars: Squadrons, like the games out of our EA Originals program, which gives us the ability to reach -- really creative smaller studios and give them the ability to kind of deliver content to our global network of players. And so at the very core, EA Play was about games. But you also saw us talk about the expansion of live services, where that was the Ultimate Teams in Madden and FIFA or other sports games for that matter, or the growing opportunity with Apex Legends and the continuing great work that, that team does, or the Sims free play. The Sims 4 and the Sims on mobile and everything that we're doing around that game and those live services. And again, that's just scratching the surface of what we're doing across our overall portfolio. And then, of course, we talked about expanding our audience. We talked about coming to Steam, which, by the way, the site -- the early response on Steam has been very, very strong. We've seen our ability to grow our audience. We've got a whole bunch of net new players to EA across the board. And our Origin platform continues to do very well. You saw us talk about bringing new games to the Switch and we continue to talk about the expansion of our subscription. So when you're taking EA Play, even as a very small snapshot of the many things that we're doing, it really lined up well against our 3 core growth drivers: great games and content, expanding and growing our live services, and expanding and growing our player reach across geographies, across platforms, across business models and, of course, across new games and services.

Great. So I've got a rather more like short-term question for Cam. The announcements around the sports titles, they're a tiny bit later than we would typically do this year in terms of time of year. What drove that? Maybe you could expand on that for us.

You mean in terms of the timing of the launches?

Yes. The launch dates, yes.

Obviously, we -- on March 16, we essentially all started working from home and with essentially no warning, and our teams across sports did an amazing job of adapting to their new circumstances. And to be honest, it's a credit to them that we're even looking at launch dates that are within a couple of weeks of when they normally would launch. So it's an extraordinary achievement. And we've learned a lot, and we've adapted our process, and we're doing everything to preserve quality. So quality launches, having stable and high-quality experience as a launch, that -- we were not going to sacrifice any of that. So as we work from home and shuffled resources around and driving to the finish, we decided to pick launch dates that were within the windows, but we gave our teams a little bit of extra time, just a couple of extra weeks, but it still allows us to launch right in the sweet spot in terms of the windows of when we want to launch those games in terms of what's going on in the real world in sports and preserve depth and quality. So I feel really good about it. We've got tremendous velocity on our projects right now. And we've gotten pretty good at doing this work from home thing. And so I'm excited about what we're going to launch this fall.

Yes. I would just jump in there, too, Chris, and say although we are seeing, a number of games slip months. I just want to thank all of our teams who continue to do unbelievably spectacular work, both in the delivery of live services to fulfill what is an insatiable appetite for games right now and building great new games. And to be within just a couple of weeks of launches from home on giant large-scale AAA games with ongoing live services is an unbelievable achievement and nothing short of inspiration. So I just -- again, for everyone, I just want to thank our teams for the amazing work that they have been doing and continue to do in service of our player base.

And I'd like to just throw in there real quick, too, that EA has been super supportive of that and realizing that the teams are going through a lot and transitioning to work from home. Some people are doing better than others. So the fact that we have so much support from the executive team has been wonderful. Like the teams really appreciate it. It's been like the pride within EA has never been higher with the way that we've been showing up with the COVID situation, with the current situation around Black Lives Matter. All that stuff has been so pride-inspiring around Respawn, and I know around all the other teams around the company. So I think it's worth calling out that you've been killing it.

Thanks, Vince. That's great.

Yes. I would totally second that as well, that's definitely my experience and of all the people that I work with outside of the studios in corporate as well. And it seems -- I feel awful asking this question now because that's a much more profound subject, and I'm going to ask Blake a very tactical question, which is what is the financial impact of moving those days out like a couple of weeks?

Yes. So just on Vince's point first, Andrew, myself, the rest of the exec team, including Vince and Cam and Samantha, Laura, we all decided, look, the most important thing is to hold this team together. It is unbelievable. And so we wanted to be really careful that we didn't give guidance that was too aggressive because we wanted to make sure we signaled to the team that we're going to do everything to keep the company focused and be really strong. And so with that said, when we gave guidance, we anticipated slightly different dates shipping FIFA and Madden and [indiscernible]. But as Cam just mentioned, we don't see that as a big issue, and we will do everything possible to fill in the week or so that is later with extra Ultimate Team activities. But more importantly, I think getting the product out at quality and strength is the thing we really have been focused on. Now having said that, we also gave guidance. Remember, we gave guidance for our first quarter that was bigger than we had ever done, double the EPS, much -- almost, I think, double on earning -- or on revenue. And what I will tell you is it has been much stronger [indiscernible]. And we're always cautious about that because we know some of that has come with some very challenging times around the world, but we also know people have been reallocating their entertainment dollars into video games. They're spending more time at home, more time with their families, and obviously, we're benefiting from it. And you'll see and hear about that when we go to give our results at the end of July for our first quarter. But what I would tell you is it has exceeded our expectations across all of our businesses, live services, full games, all of our catalog products. I mean it has been -- mobile. It's been impressive at the strength of the business. What we don't know is we don't know what that's going to look like for the next 3 quarters because none of us can predict what's going on in the world. Is there a second phase? Is everyone going back to work quickly? We ourselves are planning on a slow return to work for all of our 15,000 employees across the globe and doing it in staged way so people are very comfortable, and so we don't know how that will impact the forecast. We hope by the end of July, we have a better sense of that. I am certain we'll probably pass through some of our [ beats ] that we'll do in Q1 for the full year. But at the same time, we're all still conscious that there are a lot of people unemployed. It is still a challenge going forward, and we learn day-to-day differences. But I think Cam probably mentioned this earlier, but one of our biggest focuses is we brought a lot of new people into our games. Samantha talked about it relative to the Sims. We've seen it in Apex. How do we continue to keep them in the games and keep them engaged? And that's going to be the secret for us longer term. So we're very excited about where the business is going. We probably all wish that we didn't have to go through what the world's gone through the last 3 months to get here. But we do know that entertainment dollars will be allocated differently for a long time, restaurants, concerts, sporting events, all the things that we've done. And I think video games will continue to prove out to be one of the best opportunities and values for people in entertainment, and we will continue to see benefit from it. So we'll -- more to come when we get to July. We didn't want to give people a new guidance early. We typically don't raise guidance in the first quarter. But obviously, this year, we're doing extremely well. And the real challenge for us is going to be to try to understand what the back half of the year looks like and the overall economy looks like. But it's been a great time for video games.

Yes. I think I'll talk about earlier. There have been 2 kind of macro secular trends. And that -- the move of social interaction from being physical to digital and the move of entertainment from being linear to interactive. And we sit at the very intersection of those 2 things, and Cam spoke to it in the context of the consumption of sports, Vince spoke to it in the context of the consumption of broader entertainment, whether that's Apex or Star Wars. And as we think about the future, there are some things that we're uncertain about. But at a base level, we feel very, very good about our ability to benefit from these tremendous tailwinds that exist across our global player base.

That's great. I'm very conscious of the fact that we've only got like 1.5 minutes left and I've got a lot of questions that I'd still like to ask, and I've got a lot of questions from the audience. One quick one, Blake, that I've had several times, is on capital allocation. I wonder if you could just run through that very, very briefly for everyone on the line.

Yes. Some people don't remember, our share buyback program actually ended at the tail end of the fourth quarter, it was a 2-year [ $3.4 billion ] program, and we finished that full repurchase. We made a decision that going out with a new buyback program at that time would send [indiscernible] world as well as with [indiscernible]. Once again, we were trying to signal to our employees, keeping the team together was critical. And so we decided to pause and say, let's rethink it, we will do that in the July timeframe. And you'll most likely hear from us at the end of July. Our intent was to still [indiscernible] and we believe that will do that. But whatever, don't read any of it as a negative, but in fact probably all [indiscernible] earlier [indiscernible] but we'll see how it plays out. But I just want people to understand, we made the decision based on what was going on in the world more than anything else, and you'll hear more from us at our next earnings.

Great. Thanks. Blake, do you want to just close us up now and finish because, actually, we're out of time now.

Yes. What I will say is, first and foremost, we're feeling, as you've heard, I think, across the board from all the speakers today, feeling lucky and very positive about where we are [indiscernible] and our ability to actually move quickly to work from home, which is, as Vince said, has been nothing short of just amazing. And remember, the last quarter [indiscernible] with live service, which means we're running those businesses every day and doing that from home is [indiscernible] to get teams [indiscernible]. And we think it's also a great sign of [indiscernible]. The team has worked incredibly well together. We have probably bonded more even though it's been via Zoom, which is painful to all of us after 12 hours every day, but it's worked out really well. And I think it bodes really well for EA longer term. We'll obviously update our financials in July. We're looking forward to that, and we appreciate everybody's attention. And as I think Andrew started the call, we want to make sure everybody stays healthy, is careful about returning to the offices or whatever you might be doing from your work life, take care of your families. And we appreciate all the time that people spent with us, and we'll talk to you soon.

Thank you. I'll just add that I had a lot of questions, we've recorded them all, so we'll get to you over the next few days, and we'll return all those questions. Thanks, everyone.

Thanks, everyone.

Thanks.