How Electronic Arts Plans to Lead the Market With Its Major Brands

At Investor Day, Electronic Arts provided an interesting insight into how the major sees its future. In addition to a lot of news about doubling the audience, the use of AI, a Sims movie or the setting of Battlefield, the information between the lines was particularly exciting: the EA brands are well on the way to becoming their own metaverse-styled platforms.

An Investor Day is always about how good the future prospects are. This applies even more to US companies. And so it is not surprising that this year's Investor Day at Electronic Arts is full of self-confidence, strength and growth. CEO Andrew Wilson's core message is for sure: "We believe over the next five years we can double our audience to well over a billion people."

It is an ambitious goal, but by no means unattainable, given the figures presented by Electronic Arts at Investor Day. In the past twelve months alone, EA games have been played for over 13 billion hours. The community itself has created around 60 million hours of content, and content from and about EA games has been viewed for around 3 billion hours on streaming platforms.

There is a reason why Wilson and, subsequently, all the other top managers who appeared at the event repeatedly referred to the KPIs of game usage, created content and video usage: "There is a fundamental shift across all media in how people are consuming sports and entertainment", Wilson said. That is why there are four aspects that are crucial for the use of entertainment and games in particular: Play, Create, Watch and Connect.

AI is core of EA's business

Technology, and that includes AI, is essential to offering users the experience they want. Wilson reminded the audience that 'AI' has always been part of the gaming industry, for example in the form of simple NPCs in single-player games. "This remarkable technology is not nearly a buzzword for us. It's the very core of our business", Wilsons said.

Internally, the company is working on over 100 new AI projects, which can be categorised as efficiency, expansion and transformation. The CEO made it clear that, for example, the topic of efficiency is by no means just about cutting costs. Rather, AI should help to make what EA has always done faster, cheaper and, at the same time, of better quality. This is the only way to create more or regionally customised content that will help to reach more customers.

The development of EA Sports Collage Football 25, for example, would not have been possible without AI. It was only with the help of AI that over 150 unique stadiums and thousands of players were brought into the game. EA's new American football game is one example of many where you could pick up possible ideas between the lines. It was later mentioned that over 1.5 million team designs had already been created and shared by and with the community using the integrated Team Builder. Even though there was no hint of this, it doesn't take much imagination to see the potential such a feature would have in EA Sports FC, given the multitude of football clubs in football-playing nations.

"We believe over the next five years we can double our audience to well over a billion people." - Andrew Wilson

But there were also very specific announcements, for which representatives of top management such as Cam Weber (President EA Sports) or Laura Miele (President EA Entertainment & Technology) took to the stage and which in turn. Byron Beed, Group General Manager Battlefield, confirmed, for example, what had been announced shortly before, that the new Battlefield will have a setting in the present. Miele announced that there will be no releases of new main parts of The Sims, but that the ‘Sims’ will be further developed as a platform. Spin-offs such as the recently announced cozy game ‘My Sims’ or ‘Sims Project Stories’ for mobile devices are planned as well as a single marketplace to share user generated content. As a surprise, Miele also announced a Sims movie, which is being created in cooperation with Amazon MGM Studios. The film is produced by Lucky Chap & Vertigo, with Kate Herron as director.

500 million People played The Sims

Other interesting facts were that the collaboration with Lucasfilm has so far generated over five billion dollars in bookings, over 500 million people have played The Sims since its launch, and around 170 million people have played APX Legends. As for the three genres of sports, shooters and simulation, EA estimates the market size, excluding East Asia, at $7 billion (sports), $11 billion (shooters) and $9 billion (simulation), with the respective top three brands in the segment accounting for 80 per cent (sports), 60 per cent (shooters) and 65 per cent (simulation).

The platform plans for The Sims, but also for sports games and even IPs like Battlefield, show very clearly that Electronic Arts is increasingly pursuing a strategy reminiscent of the metaverse approach of Minecraft, Roblox or even Fortnite. In addition to the content created by internal developers, users are increasingly becoming creators themselves. This is where technology and AI come in again.

Miele, who is also responsible for the advancement of technology within EA, gave some interesting insights here as well. First and foremost, the Frostbyte Engine is one of the most important and powerful tools in the group, which excels at creating characters and fantastic worlds. This, in conjunction with the Shared Asset Library, where all assets from all studios are categorised, stored and available to all internal dev resources, not only makes rapid prototyping easy, but the assets can also be used to train EA's AI tools. And ultimately, they should be able to do two things in particular: improve the player experience and make the developers‘ work easier.