In a crushing but admittedly unsurprising blow to the hopes of many a fan who had hoped the once-beloved FPS franchise would return to delivering quality outings sooner rather than later, Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson has revealed that the next Battlefield game is “going to be another tremendous live service [title].”
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Wilson offered this unfortunate confirmation regarding the Battlefield franchise’s future while fielding investor questions alongside the company’s VP Andrew Uerkwitz and CFO Stuart Canfield at the tail end of EA’s Q4 2024 earnings call, as held on May 7th.
During this Q&A session, the trio were at one point asked by ROTH MKM Senior Research Analyst Eric Handler if they could “break down in terms of percentages” the exact genre make-up of their live service offerings.
However, rather than fulfilling his request, the EA leadership team instead chose to speak to the broader overview of their overall live service plans.
“We’re not going to break down directly the splits across the live service businesses,” explained Canfield, responding on behalf of his colleagues. “As a reminder, the live service category encompasses not only sort of sports, also incorporates mobile, incorporates other parts of our business, whether it’s our subscription business from EA Play and other parts that comprise live services. It’s a heavily aggregated category across multiple levers we have by virtue of the portfolio and the strategy we carry today.”
“Obviously, we think that through our massive online communities, they are our largest components as we come through that live service piece,” he continued. “When you think about [EA Sports FC], Sims and Apex as comprising the biggest three of those mass online communities, we look to add obviously college football this year and obviously, Madden accompanies that inside of that envelope.”
And it was in attempting to offer support to his CFO’s above declarations that Wilson would break the bad news to Battlefield players.
Jumping off of Canfield’s remarks, Wilson then interjected, “I might just add, one of the great differentiators of our company is actually the breadth of our live services.”
“So if you look at FY 2024 as we come into FY 2025, at the very center of our FY 2024 was this incredible rebranding of [FIFA to EA Sports FC] and the launching and growth of that [brand] even as we lapped a World Cup year,” said the CEO. “Madden, again, a live service that grew and reached record levels of revenue. We had our biggest EA SPORTS year, I would argue that EA SPORTS may be one of the greatest global multi-sport media brands in the world and certainly has greater fandom than most other brands that it competes with. We had double-digit growth in the community on The Sims, which again targets a very, very different demographic of players.”
“And when we look at the many hundreds of millions of shared user-generated content items, you are seeing the evolution of that live service into a broader community creation platform,” Wilson added. “We continue to build resilience into Apex. And as a community sentiment of that grew 29 points over the last fiscal year. And as we’re primed to continue to grow and expand that live service, we have great opportunity.”
To this end, the CEO sadly divulged, “I’ve just spent a whole bunch of time with the collective Battlefield team, playing what they’re building and it is going to be another tremendous live service.”
“And if you really use [EA Sports FC] as the blueprint and you think about across platforms, across modalities, across business models, across geographies and also branching fan beyond the bounds of the traditional game to create truly a football fan platform that really extends the magnitude of the live service,” ultimately concluded Wilson. “This really is at the very center of our strategy when we talk about building content and experiences that entertain and engage massive online communities. And so, as we think about this going forward, we believe this differentiates us from the marketplace in video games and certainly in the marketplace in entertainment and really positions us for real growth against what these emerging generations are looking for in the context of their entertainment consumption.”
Bafflingly, it should be noted that EA’s doubling down on their live service plans comes at a time when the model is actively being rejected by players.
This isn’t just an anecdotal observation either – EA themselves admitted as much earlier in the earnings call.
As detailed by Wilson, “Live services net bookings was $5.43 billion, down 2% year-over-year or down 1% in constant currency. Excluding the impact of the sunset of Apex Mobile, live service net bookings was about flat year-over-year. Strength in live services was driven by high teens growth year-over-year in our global football franchise, fueled by FC Ultimate Team and FC Mobile was offset by declines in Apex Legends.”
And according to the CEO, said live service struggles are likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
“Our Q1 FY 2025 outlook reflects many of the trends we saw in Q4 2024 related to slate timing and atypical seasonality as we lap difficult comps year-over-year,” he explained to investors. “Live services, including EA SPORTS FC and Apex Legends will continue to face difficult comparable periods.
Turning his attentions to the overall FY 2025, Wilson asserted, “We expect fiscal year net bookings of $7.3 billion to $7.7 billion, down 2% to up 4% year-over-year with mid-single-digit growth in our core live services business, partially offset by fewer title launches, lighter catalog contributions and headwinds from our mobile business related to portfolio optimization decisions taken over the last six months. Excluding our sunset titles, we expect mobile to be up low single digit.”
All in all: “That’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for them.”
