EA College Football Update Via EA Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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During Electronic Arts' Q1 2024 Earnings Call on August 1, EA CEO Andrew Wilson mentioned EA SPORTS College Football several times during the course of his opening statement and in answering questions from analysts.

While the answers are generally vague, it is encouraging to hear the game - approximately one year away from release - being discussed during the earnings call. Wilson mentions that the game currently has many schools on-board and that they will continue working to get real players into the title.

The next earnings call will take place on November 1, 2023. Continue on to read the transcript from relevant aspects of the call.


From Andrew Wilson's opening statement:

Our multiyear targeted investments toward our biggest opportunities include global titles like blockbuster storytelling from Dragon Age, incredible skateboarding gameplay and social connection from skate, and a revival of EA SPORTS College Football that celebrates the action, culture, and tradition of the sport like never before.

...

Clay Griffin -- MoffettNathanson -- Analyst

Yes. Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. I wondered if, Andrew, I appreciate the context in terms of the pipeline, I guess, wanted to get perhaps an update on college football.

There's a lot of things going on in terms of licensing and just wondering if you could just give us a sense of where that title is, I suppose. And then on FIFA, I wanted to ask, the daily active number. Just wanted to get a sense of to drill down if you might be able to give us some sense of monetization impacts in the quarter at Ultimate Team. Thanks.

Andrew Wilson -- Chief Executive Officer

OK. Great. Let me take the college football piece, and I'll hand off to Stuart to think about FIFA in the quarter. The team is making incredible progress around college football.

Again, we have a long history and an incredible legacy around building this great game in terms of the context of American football, in addition to our very, very famous and culturally relevant Madden franchise. College football has always played a meaningful part in gameplay in this country. The team is doing an incredible job building out what would be the future of college football. Game players are really coming together and really capturing all of the action and pageantry and the difference in college football versus the NFL.

I feel very confident in what the team is doing. We're certainly -- we're working through the license situation broadly. And as of now, we've got many, if not most, of the schools' license as part of our licensing platform. And we'll continue to work with the various governing bodies of the sport in the country and some key third-party partners that we have around how and when to include college athletes themselves into the game, and we'll work very closely with them.

But I'm confident that this will be an incredible reemergence of our college football experience, that it will capture all the action and pageantry driven by the schools and all that goes on with the schools and the conduct of this game. And I do believe that we'll find a place where we can work in lockstep with the athletes for inclusion in the game as well.

...

Matthew Cost -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Hi, everybody. Thanks for taking the question. I guess starting maybe with Andrew and Laura. Can you talk a little -- in a little more detail about the decision to reorganize the studios into the entertainment and the sports segments and what you'll be able to do differently and better now that you couldn't do before? And then I have one follow-up.

Thanks.

Andrew Wilson -- Chief Executive Officer

Yes. Let me start there, and then Laura can come in and kind of share a little about how she's thinking about the entertainment part of the company. Again, we've had this -- we aren't as a company, first and foremost, around our plays. We have over 700 million in our network, and they're spending more and more time with us.

And as we think about the future, serving those players in a world where they choose interactive entertainment as their first form of entertainment, and they choose the games and experiences that they play as the No. 1 way to connect and stay connected with their friends. And as we think about the future of entertainment, for us when we drive toward entertaining and engaging that audience of 700 million that we hope grows well beyond 1 billion to 2 billion over the course of time, we wanted to really think about how best to serve those players. And while we're almost absolutely -- almost certainly have crossover between players who play FC and Apex and Need for Speed and Madden, the nature of development and the nature of how those games are built and developed is very different and is getting more different as time passes.

And what we wanted to get to as we continue to scale the company, as we continue to scale our franchises and scale the live services that are born from those franchises, get to a place where we were able to empower our creative leaders even more than we have been. We've been on a move over the last five or six years to really give more power to our creative leaders to build and grow and drive their businesses with the direct connection that they have with our players. And we want -- this was the very next evolutionary step in that process and really about giving them more creative autonomy, business autonomy as they are most deeply connected and directly connected to these networks of players and these communities of players that they play with, and it was really about getting to an accelerated level of decision-making and an accelerated level of development. I think we're already starting to see the benefits of that.

We've outlined our strategy very clearly. We believe that the future of entertainment is interactive. We believe that any large-scale entertainment company will need to understand and appreciate and be able to develop in the conduct of interactive entertainment for these audiences that are choosing what we do as their first form. And as we think about that building out these platforms that deliver experiences and entertain massive online communities, its ability to tell blockbuster interactive stories and its ability to harness the power of these communities, not just inside the game, but outside the game, and as we look at what's going on with FC right now, as we think about a reimagined Madden, as we think about the reemergence of college football and all that's happening across our EA SPORTS portfolio, we're seeing accelerated moves toward that.

As I think about what's happening in Laura's organization and the speed at which the Respawn team has been able to respond in the context of what's happening in Apex season 17 as we move toward Apex Season 18, as we think about what's happening for Battlefield and what's happening for The Sims, I'm really excited because I think we're already seeing the clock speed of our organization increase. And my sense is that will mean that we will build more things, better things, higher-quality things that entertain more people around the world over time.


Transcript courtesy: The Motley Fool. Hat tip: Extra Points with Matt Brown.