EA aims to double audience to over 1 billion in 5 years

Electronic Arts said it plans to double its global audience to over a billion people in the next five years.

The updates are part of EA’s investor day where it is briefing investors about its plans for the future, which include outpacing market growth and driving margin expansion through fiscal year 2027.

“We are excited to unveil an in-depth look inside the growing scale and scope of our IP portfolio, as we accelerate engagement and social connection in and around our biggest franchises,” said Andrew Wilson, CEO of EA, in a statement. “We are also introducing new experiences and leveraging innovative technology to serve our global communities and attract new audiences, as we continue to transform our business and shape the future of entertainment.”

EA said it is focused on three strategic pillars – entertaining and engaging massive online communities; creating blockbuster interactive storytelling; and harnessing the power of community to accelerate growth in, around, and beyond games. 

“We are committed to growing our business at scale and expanding operating margins through a disciplined approach to capital allocation,” said Stuart Canfield, CFO of EA, in a statement. “Our strategy gives us confidence we can significantly outpace market growth through fiscal 2027.”

Canfield said EA is investing in huge gaming ecosystems around blockbuster games.

“These will communities drive significant future growth, bringing together what we shared. We’re investing in massive online community across three of the most compelling gaming categories: sports, first person and lifestyle,” he said.

He added, “We believe over the next three years, we’ll have six massive online communities in the market, EA Sports FC, American football, Apex legends, Battlefield” as well as The Sims and Skate.

Canfield said. “This could unlock significant value through network effects and a common scale through play, create, watch, connect. We believe in continuous scale.” He said the company will consider strategic acquisitions as part of its growth plan.

In an update since its last earnings call, EA said the company is on track towards the high end of the net bookings guidance, provided on July 30, 2024, for the second fiscal quarter ending September 30, 2024 and the fiscal year ending March 31, 2025.

During the event, Mihir Vaidya, chief strategy officer, shared more about the transformative potential the company sees in a future super-charged by AI. Wilson said that AI isn’t just about efficiency. It’s also about creativity and expansion, like giving creative teams a bigger canvas to build worlds, he said.

Vaidya showed a demo where ordinary gamers created their own game world using natural language descriptions.

Vaidya said, “What you saw was an illustration of two friends jumping into an open sandbox in a new world made of boxes in real time without any coding expertise, and in a matter of seconds, existing elements in their favorite games, asset libraries, databases and communities, elements like characters, weapons, gameplay systems and logic here. The incredible thing is they were able to do this instantly. Using nothing more than that language. This remixing of conditional elements would not be possible without EA is massive proprietary data set.”

He also showed off an AI likeness of English soccer star Jude Bellingham, made with his permission.

“We believe AI will greatly expand and transform the entertainment experience in user generated content. It will accelerate how innovators and creators in entertainment are building and delivering experiences rooted in self expression, content creation, curation and instant gratification — the kind of entertainment that today players and fans can deeply thrive,” Wilson said. “The future of entertainment is interactive in a broader media landscape where sport and entertainment options are exponentially growing. It is the biggest IPs and experiences that will capture the most value, our creative talent, our production strength, our broad portfolio of incredible owned IP including EA Sports, and our deeply connected global network supercharged by AI.”

EA Entertainment

EA reconfirmed it is working on a film based on The Sims in partnership with Amazon MGM Studios. Kate Heron will direct The Sims movie, which will also include LuckyCha Entertainment and Vertigo Entertainment.

Through this and other updates, the company plans to double The Sims annual net bookings over the next five years. This is part of the EA Entertainment division.

Laura Miele, President, EA Entertainment and Technology, detailed various examples of EA-owned IP, including some of the world’s most beloved blockbuster franchises, as well as licensed IP through powerful collaborations.

“We believe we can more than double our net bookings over the next five years,” Miele said.

She said The Sims has had 210 million hours watched, one billion gallery downloads and 500 million lifetime players. There are 26.5 million social followers for The Sims. The next version will be The Sims Universe, with The Sims 4 as the core foundation. It will have a new experiences, dubbed The Sims Project Rene, and it will build out the cozy My Sims line for the Nintendo Switch and more, and it will launch The Sims Project Stories on mobile. She said AI will supercharge the development, with tools like AI-based discovery tools to search through the global UGC gallery of 100 million assets.

In addition, the company also gave investors a preview of the next-level Battlefield experience, which IGN reported on yesterday. The game will be set in modern days and the team will launch a playtesting program with the community early next year, further underscoring the team’s commitment to engage with its players. 

And EA also offered an update on the long-in-the-making Skate game. The team highlighted how they are enhancing the game with the community to develop a place for fans to create new game modes, hang out in the city, connect with friends, share their creations, and host cool events. 

EA’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard is coming on October 31. EA’s Motive is making Marvel’s Iron Man in an action-adventure game. Cliffhanger Games is making Black Panther, with new tech and an original story, Miele said.

She said the Marvel games are early in development, but she notes that EA games based on franchise partners have generated $5 billion to date.

“They will lay the foundation for potential new IP in the future,” she said.

EA said Battlefield has had 5 billion hours played and 100 milllion players. Four studios are working on the franchise. (By comparison, the rival Call of Duty has 10 studios). In the last 12 months, players have played 250 million hours.

“The size of our opportunity is massive,” she said.

Byron Beede, who is leading Battlefield under exec Vince Zampella, said the focus is on delivering experiences only Battlefield can deliver. Four studios are working on different parts of the Battlefield universe: DICE on multiplayer, Criterion Games on single-player and multiplayer, Motive on single-player storytelling and action, and Ripple Effect which is working on a new Battlefield experience.

The team has been playing the game daily for over a year, and community testing will star early next year, Beede said.

EA Technology

Miele also talked about the other part of her organization, technology and central development.

She said technologists are spread throughout the game teams, enterprise teams, central tools and engine teams, among many others.

“But what makes EA special is our culture of partnership and collaboration, which means central technology teams are accelerators to the work of our games team,” she said. “The strategy is good for our players and it’s good for our developers. Now we are moving into an era where massive online communities … will define our business. So scale matters more than ever.”

She said the company will evolve from game to platforms, from product to community.

“We cannot talk about technology without talking about AI in your lap. For you that our AI strategy is focused on three key factors, efficiency, expansion and transformation, and the strategy is built on decades of work with AI,” she said. “Ten years ago, we started building our central technology platform, bringing together our capabilities around data, commerce, ID and security. Then we’ve added AI functionality to scale the capabilities of this infrastructure.”

The team manages over 100 machine learning and large language models on this central platform, and it handles over a billion AI requests daily.

EA invests heavily in its proprietary game engine, Frostbite, for scaling shared technology across the company. This engine powers sports, action and shooter games across all platforms, and has become one of the largest engines in the industry.

“By taking advantage of shared engine tools and workflows, advances explicitly engineered for one game could easily be adopted by another, accelerating innovation across the studios in our company, Frostbite is incredibly powerful as its evolution and its future roadmap are driven by its deep partnership across our game teams,” she said.

Frostbite focuses on two particular areas of game development: highly believable characters, which include advanced facial animation, fluid movement, realistic cloth and amazing hair strands; and, second, immersive worlds with cutting-edge lighting, deformable destruction and photorealistic textures.

EA also has a shared asset library with centralized 3D data and assets goijng back decades.

“This library is like the Smithsonian of game assets. They are fully curated, labeled and exclusive to our teams. This provides our developers with a wealth of content that allows for rapid prototyping, but also game-ready assets they can quickly modify to go directly in their game,” she said. “This library also serves another essential purpose in that it educates our machine learning and large language models with our proprietary data. As you would imagine, this has become more and more critical in this new age of AI.”

She also mentioned a project dubbed “script to scene.” This initiative aggregates multiple workflows to create a powerful tool for developers to create characters, direct performances and defined worlds, all from text. She showed how it can be used to create a character or a Parisian apartment building.

EA Sports

Cam Weber, president of EA Sports, shared the company’s ambition to be the most valuable sports business in the world. EA Sports already has one of the broadest and strongest intellectual property portfolios in sports.

It shared more about its plans to grow the thriving massive online communities for its biggest franchises. The Madden franchise just had its strongest year, reaching all-time highs for unique players, monthly and weekly active users, and net bookings.

EA Sports College Football became the largest new console game launch in North America in 2024 and EA Sports FC fans have spent more than eight billion hours playing our experiences in the last year alone.

EA Sports also addressed how innovation will continue to set up the brand for future growth, starting with current gameplay examples like FC IQ, a new tactical AI system that leverages real-world data in FC 25, and new run-time physics system in Madden NFL 25.

And EA Sports also mentioned new tech and capabilities that enable authentic content and immersion at a huge scale like Stadium Builder Toolkit and the HeadStart system in College Football 25.

Weber said that hundreds of millions of fans are engaging with EA Sports.

“Our EA Sports franchises constitute one of the largest and most wide reaching entertainment portfolios in all of sport. Across platforms and geographies, we’re delivering interactive experiences that reach and engage more fans than anyone else in sports,” he said.

In the past 18 months, EA launched 13 new HD games across nine franchises. And it has done thousands of live service updates. Players have spent eight billion hours with EA FC in the last year and he said the equivalent of about 23,000 seasons are played in Madden every day.

“To put it in perspective, based on our estimates, we believe there are more than 4 billion sports fans around the world. More than a billion of those are from younger generations who are still growing their fandom,” Weber said. “And it’s with that in mind that our five year strategy positions us for further growth against this opportunity.”

Weber said there are “virtual open world experiences” being built by EA teams now, with a focus on emergent gameplay and self-expression. He said they will be introduced into EA ecosystems in the years ahead. He noted athletes and fans themselves will become the creators.

“EA Sports FC is already a massive global football platform, and on a trailing 12 month basis, it’s now the biggest video game franchise in the Western world,” Weber said. “Hundreds of millions have joined our player network and our FC ecosystem already, and we’re meeting them with different experiences on different platforms, across geographies, across different business models, with Madden, NFL and college football.”

Weber said that tech has helped produce the College Football game, which had a new stadium builder toolkit and dynamic lighting system. Thanks to machine learning, EA was able to create more than 11,000 college football athlete likenesses in just three months.

EA Experiences 

In a new category, David Tinson, chief experiences officer at EA, also outlined the company’s strategy to expand its audience by entering new markets, engaging and growing its massive online communities beyond games.

The company plans to do this by building and developing products, features, and capabilities that will drive deeper connections in a more social way. Wilson said this is part of the vision to build connected platforms that deliver more value and less friction where fans can play, create, watch and connect.

One example of this strategy is the introduction of the EA Sports App, which soft-launches in Spain this fall for iOS and Android devices.

The EA Sports App will initially be a socially-driven app, with a combination of sports content, live sports data, social messaging, interactivity and gaming centered on Global Football. EA expects the app to blend real and virtual sports content, to connect, engage and reward fans everywhere through unparalleled access to their favorite sports. 

EA also is launching the ability for fans to buy sports gear and clothing inside EA’s own games.

You can see the presentation here.