Electronic Arts Inc. Price & Performance (EA)

Electronic Arts makes these statements as of today February 4, 2025 and disclaims any duty to update them. During this call, the financial metrics, with the exception of free cash flow and non GAAP operating margin, will be presented on a GAAP basis. All comparisons made in the course of this call are against the same period in the prior Now, I'll turn the call over to Andrew Wilson. Thanks, Andrew. Good afternoon. I want to start by thanking our teams In Q3, they shared their creativity, dedication and innovation with the world through high quality games and experiences. Our relentless focus on execution delivery ensures we continue to bring incredible sports experiences and blockbuster entertainment to 100 of millions of players and fans around the world. However, Q3 was not the financial performance we wanted [indiscernible] We know as a leader in global entertainment, great titles even when built and delivered with polished execution can sometimes miss our financial expectations. So let me provide more context on the quarter and share actions taken to build momentum as we head into the new fiscal year. Our blockbuster storytelling strategy is built on 3 strategic objectives. [indiscernible] 2nd, and third, emphasize high quality launches across both PC and console.

In order to break out beyond the core audience, games need to directly connect to the evolving demands of players who increasingly seek shared world features and deeper engagement alongside high quality narratives in this beloved category. Dragon Age had a high quality launch and was well reviewed by critics and those who played. However, it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market. Now let me dive deeper into the context around EA Sports FC's temporary underperformance the immediate actions taken.

FC started Q3 in a strong position It had a high quality and stable launch. It won Sports Game of the Year and preorders, engagement and player monetization were each up year over year, leading to net bookings in October that were up double digits year over year. However, this momentum did not sustain through the quarter. 2 contributing factors to performance downsides was Soft's top and final acquisition a lapsed engagement later in the quarter. While early acquisitions started out strong, post launch acquisition cohorts waited longer in the cycle to acquire the new title as many stayed in prior iterations. Combined players in our full HD experiences were flat year over year. This mix shift and slower new player acquisition accounted for about half of the titles underperformance versus expectations. Softer than expected engagement made up most of the rest. We're constantly tuning the game to drive a competitive and engaging experience. This year, after a number of key changes to gameplay, we started to hear more feedback than usual around specific issues with balance from one of our most competitive cohorts. This resulted in lower than expected engagement into the end of the quarter. We took the time to listen and validate what we were hearing.

And implemented some significant changes to both the gameplay experience and corresponding progression and rewards in a large update that went live for players on January 16, just before the launch of our Team of the Year event. These actions were a success as we've seen a strong response to the title update and our event as well as positive gameplay sentiment indicators from our community.

Following the gameplay update and our popular team of the year event, we have reactivated over 2,000,000 Ultimate Team players with all acquisition cohorts experiencing positive trends. Player retention rates surpassed our expectations and saw a record title over the events weekend. Together, these markets are leading net bookings to be up year over year for the 2 week event. Our live service drives billions of fan engagement annually and we're constantly updating and fine tuning both gameplay and our programs to meet ongoing feedback and evolving expectations from our community. Individually, these FC play dynamics would not have materially impacted our In fact, these are part of the normal course of managing and growing a live service business. However, the convergence of these dynamics became a material source of downside requiring our immediate and comprehensive response.

We consider this to be a temporary moment not structural. Our global football franchise net bookings have grown over 70% over the last 5 fiscal years, making it one of the biggest sports entertainment properties in the world. To put this year in perspective, FY 'twenty five is still expected to be the 2nd biggest year for the franchise. Given this context around our Q3 results, we remain confident that our strategy focusing on entertaining massive online communities, telling blockbuster stories and harnessing the power of community remains on track.

Now let me provide more color the rest of our portfolio. The power of EA Sports comes from our team's unique ability to Great deep rich and highly valuable IP where our players fully immerse themselves in the action fandom and culture of their favorite sport. Nowhere else can fans experience the depth authenticity and quality that our sports titles deliver. With an incredible year, we're just beginning to unlock the immense opportunity within our growing American football ecosystem. The number of players is up double digits year over year as our expanded offerings strengthen and build on the passion of our community. Our teams continue to deliver compelling content across the ecosystem seamlessly introducing players to new experiences. This quarter, we saw players in Ultimate Team grow by double digits as we deepen player engagement and connection, We continue to build momentum into FY26 as we come off what we believe will be a record year for EA Sports. The real life college season has culminated in its 1st 12 team Nash [indiscernible] EA Sports, the NFL and the NFL PA continue to partner to grow the sport and reach new fans around the world through our unrivaled Madden NFL franchise.

Together with our partners, we are fully focused on our strategy to continue to forge our 2 American football titles into a massive online community where players can connect, celebrate their fandom and harness powerful tools to create content. We are also building all new innovative modalities of social play with more access points to further engage and entertain core new and casual players. While we continue to invest and focus on our core FC business, we are also building towards a bold vision for the future delivering for 100 of millions of global fans through a connected ecosystem of experiences including new modalities of play. For example, we're developing an entirely new world within the FC platform built around groundbreaking gameplay and cutting edge tools for social connection and content creation. We are leaning into next level ways to engage fans of the world's biggest sport across the FC platform through play, create, watch and connect. In service of our players and fans, we are also pushing beyond the bounds of our sports franchises. Yesterday, we shared that we reached an agreement to acquire Trade Cap Technologies, Data is at the center of every meaningful advancement in sports today, and this group has developed best in class optical sports tracking, real time volumetric data capture technology and analysis capabilities that can extend EA Sports' lead accelerating how we deliver more authentic, deeply immersive gameplay that mirrors the fluidity and excitement of real world athletes and competition.

Longer term, TRACAP's capabilities also help us accelerate against our bold vision for the EA Sports app to be the world's leading interactive sports platform following a successful initial regional trial in Q3. Through a combination of TrayCab's real time data technology and our proprietary game engine, we can enable completely new opportunities for fans to create and share real world sports content in their own way. Reimagining highlights generating casual and complex game simulations and watching broadcast alternatives on demand. We're working to make the EA Sports app the new frontier for interactive sports fandom beyond games, and we look forward to sharing more about our plans in the months ahead. This is one of several bold new steps in our ecosystem plans to engage players and fans across more geographies in around and beyond our games. [indiscernible] together with our core experiences gives us confidence in the future of EA Sports. As we look beyond sports, we've never had a stronger pipeline of entertainment experiences. We continue to execute across the portfolio and the next 2 years will prove to be an incredibly exciting time For EA, and our players.

Yesterday's announcement of Data Field Labs is a key development in our ongoing expansion of massive online communities. Battlefield Labs is launching at a crucial moment in our development journey at a scale that allows us to test and refine the game with our community in a way that's unprecedented for Battlefield. This is about embracing a modern, more dynamic approach to development one that acknowledges how the market has shifted, how player expectations have evolved, and how we show up for our players in ways to deliver a truly next level experience. This latest news from our teams is a crucial step towards Battlefield's release in FY 'twenty 6. These are exciting times for The Sims as well, with a cultural icon celebrating its 25th birthday this year.

New updates and features are driving engagement across a massive community of players. A great proof point of our ongoing strategy at work is the launch of the first 2 creative kits ever designed our top influencers and content creators. These kits marked the first time that a full collection of in game assets have been crafted by creators and officially published by The Sims development team. This is a great step on a path to building a global creator platform [indiscernible] Following the console playtest this month, Skate remains on track for launch this year across PC console and mobile. Introducing a fresh community driven model for gaming with native cross platform and cross progression. Additionally, as we continue to make progress across our strategy to use AI to transform how we deliver entertainment to the world, we recently made the strategic decision to unify our central technology functions under a single Chief Technology Officer Matt Tommonsen. This alignment reinforces our commitment to embedding technology at core of our business strategies and operations, enabling us to drive innovation expand our creative canvas, build bigger and bolder experiences and deepen our connections as a community driven entertainment company. Matt has been instrumental in shaping the technology strategies and infrastructure that empower our teams to create and collaborate.

I greatly look forward to working with him as our CTO. We believe the fundamental long term outlook of our business is strong as we further sharpen our focus on entertaining and connecting more people for more time across the world. EA's creative talent, production strength, broad IP and technology leadership powered the execution of a vision to deliver more excitement creation and connection for our global network of players and fans. Looking to FY 'twenty six and beyond, we are taking bold steps across our sports and entertainment portfolio, to shape the future of interactive entertainment. And now I'll turn the call over to Stuart for a deeper look the quarter, and our business.

Thank you, Andrew, and hello, everyone. To echo Andrew's remarks, Q3 was not the quarter we expected.

But despite the impact to our near term results, our long term outlook remains unchanged. Our teams remain focused on player feedback continually adapting our games and services to reflect evolving player preferences addition to refining our portfolio to deliver sustainable growth, Today, we're announcing our plans for a $1,000,000,000 accelerated stock repurchase in addition to our current $375,000,000 per quarter program, bringing total stock repurchases to $2,500,000,000 within the 1st year of our $5,000,000,000 authorization This action reinforces our strategy and commitment to returning capital to stockholders. It also demonstrates our confidence in our long term growth outlook supported by our strong balance sheet and cash flow generation. We remain committed to advancing our strategic initiatives while effectively balancing business investment with returning capital to stockholders. Now turning to the quarter. In Q3, net bookings was $2,200,000,000 down 6% year over year.

Dragon Age: The Vail Guard underperformed highlighting the competitive dynamics of the single player RPG market and EA Sports FC 25 started strong but softened through the holiday period. We saw minimal impact from FX within the quarter. Within total net bookings, full gain was 630 $3,000,000 down 3% year over year and live services and other was $1,580,000,000 down 8% year over year. On a trailing 12 month basis, live services are 74% of our business. Let me start with Dragon Age: The Vail Guard. Historically, blockbuster storytelling has been the primary way our industry fought beloved IP to players. The game's financial performance highlights the evolving industry landscape and reinforces the importance of our actions to reallocate resources towards our most significant and highest potential opportunities. Now, I'd like to provide further insights into the quarterly dynamics in Global Football that Andrew shared earlier. Following 2 consecutive fiscal years of double digit net bookings growth, our Global Football franchise saw a mid single digit decline year over year in Q3. The softer than expected results in HD was only partially offset by continued growth in FC Mobile. The HD underperformance a result of 2 key factors. Firstly, which led to lower than expected full game sales of FC25.

Despite having 40,000,000 players across our catalog of HD titles, at December promotional events to drive conversion, fell short of expectations and historical rates as players remain engaged with prior versions of the game. Secondly, as Andrew mentioned, saw faster than usual engagement churn in a competitive cohort as the quarter progressed. Despite having positive key metrics early in the quarter, this player group's engagement was down high single digits. Mirroring our net bookings decline. [indiscernible] we regularly manage these factors within live service, their combination had a compounding effect. Faster than usual engagement churn, coupled with lower acquisition credit pressure on lower funnel performance. Our live service model's greatest strength is our ability to experiment, tweak, respond and deliver changes for our players.

Our January 16th gameplay update launched ahead of our marquee is a prime example of this adaptability. Since the gameplay release, we have seen a significant turnaround in momentum with competitive cohorts trending towards prior year levels with net bookings up year over year during the event. We remain confident in the sustainable long term growth of global football as we continue to refine the experience expand engagement opportunities and build toward an even brighter future for the franchise. Within Global Football for Q3, FC Mobile saw double digit increase in new players, engagement and monetization year over year. FC Online was up slightly as strong promotional content drove monetization expansion of our American football community has continued to see strength. With weekly active users and total unique spenders up double digit year over year in the quarter. In Apex Legends, net bookings were down year over year in the quarter but performed in line with our expectations. The Sims franchise delivered year over year net bookings growth in Q3 as we continue to broaden the franchise by delivering focused updates and new player experiences that deeply engage and captivate our community. During the quarter, we launched 2 new creative kits in The Sims 4 and the launch of the My Sims Cozy Bundle outperformed our expectations.

With My Sims Cozy Bundle, we saw over 50% of those who purchased a game were new to EA as we expanded our offerings on the Switch platform. Now moving to our GAAP quarterly results. We delivered Q3 net revenue of $1,880,000,000 down 3% year over year. Gross margins increased 300 basis points largely a result of lower licensing costs.

Operating expenses came in below our expectations at 1 point $5,000,000,000 flat to the prior year. Earnings per share was $1.11 up 4% year over year. We delivered operating cash flow of $1,180,000,000 for the quarter down 7% year over year. On a trailing 12 months basis, operating cash flow reached $2,110,000,000 and free cash flow reached $1,89,000,000 as our business continues to be a strong generator of cash. Please see our earnings slides for further cash flow information. In the Q3, we returned $425,000,000 to stockholders through stock repurchases and dividends. Now turning to guidance. 2 weeks ago, we updated our FY 'twenty five guidance. I want to outline the assumptions underpinning our outlook. First, American Football business remains on track to surpass $1,000,000,000 in net bookings for FY 2nd, we revised our expectations to include lower contributions from Dragon Age: The FELGARD. 3rd, let me walk through our assumptions for Global Football. As mentioned, our Global Football net bookings in Q3 saw a mid single digit decline year over year. As we exited Q3, HD experienced saw double digit declines year over year in net bookings during December and the early weeks of January. However, following the January 16th gameplay update, and the launch of Team of the Year, we saw strong momentum resulting in a return to year over year growth during the event.

Despite this positive trend, FY 'twenty five guidance at the midpoint adopts a prudent approach. Anticipating a low double digit decline in global football franchise net bookings for Q4. That said, remain optimistic about the potential for continued momentum given team of the years the start of our Future Stars event, and other upcoming events and updates this quarter. Our approach is measured our teams learned from Q3 continue to bring updates to the game monitor player feedback, And 4th, beyond Global Football, our core live services assumptions remained largely unchanged. These changes to our underlying assumptions have shaped our revised guidance range. We shared on January 22. As a reminder, we expect FY 'twenty five net bookings to be $7,000,000,000 to $7,150,000,000 down 6% to down 4% year over year. Turning to our FY 'twenty five GAAP outlook. We are lowering net revenue guidance to $7,250,000,000 to $7,400,000,000 We expect the cost of revenue to be 1 point $48,000,000,000 to $1,490,000,000 We now expect operating expenses to be approximately $4,380,000,000 to $4,390,000,000 up 1% year over year. As a result, we expect GAAP operating margin to be 19.2% to 20.5%. We expect non GAAP operating margin to be 30.5 percent to 31.6 percent The impact from change in deferred net revenue expected to be approximately negative $2.50 negative 240 basis points.

This results in a revised earnings per share of $3.90 to $4.25 We're also adjusting our operating cash flow guidance to $1,800,000,000 to $1,900,000,000 Capital expenditures are still expected to be $225,000,000 resulting in free cash flow guidance of $1,575,000,000 to $1,675,000,000 As a reminder, we had a one time cash tax benefit of $150,000,000 in the prior year If rates remain unchanged from today, we expect minimal impact to net bookings from FX. For more information on the impact of FX movements, please refer to our earnings slides.

Turning to Q4, expect net bookings of $1,444,000,000 to $1,594,000,000 down 13% to down 4% year over year.

Largely driven by declines in global football, and Apex Legends, partially offset by the release of Split Fiction. We expect net revenue of $1,682,000,000 to $1,830,000,000 cost of revenue to be $305,000,000 to $315,000,000 and operating expenses of approximately 1 point $112,000,000,000 to $1,122,000,000 resulting in earnings per share of $0.65 $1 Now before I hand off to Andrew, I want to take a moment to discuss our long term financial framework, which we shared last year. Our multiyear outlook is designed to provide the flexibility needed to effectively manage 2 critical drivers of success: game development timelines and market dynamics. With a strong one up of new experiences, including EA Sports College Football 26, Battlefield and Skate we are positioned to return to growth in FY 'twenty 6. Beyond FY 'twenty six, we will continue to expand our current franchises while also bringing blockbuster storytelling to market. Additionally, we'll make measured progress beyond our games as we continue to scale our EA SPORTS app advertising and sponsorship opportunities. Altogether, we believe these initiatives will drive both top line growth and margin expansion through FY 'twenty seven and into the future as we outlined at our September Investor Day. We'll look forward to providing further updates on FY 'twenty 6 in May and remain focused on disciplined execution, prioritized capital allocation and strategic investments that drive value for our players, [indiscernible] stockholders.

Now, I'll hand back to Andrew.

Thank you, Stuart. Exceptional effort and polished execution don't always generate the results we aim for. The actions we have taken demonstrate the focus and determination of our teams and the deep resiliency of our business. The very definition of entertainment is rapidly changing. Now more than ever, our success as a company will come from anticipating and exceeding player expectations to deliver innovative experiences that engage, entertain and connect people everywhere across an ever evolving landscape. Thank you, and now Stuart and I are here for your questions.

With that, we are now ready for the first question. Your first question comes from the line of Andrew Marocque of Raymond James. Your line is open. Hi, thanks for taking my questions. Maybe one on the ad aspect of FC around the slower than anticipated acquisition. Do you have any sense of the drivers behind the slower up take of the current year title? Is it anything maybe to do with market structure like a console generation transition effect? Or maybe something like people hearing negative feedback in the community and deciding to hold off on purchase for a little bit?

Great question. Thank you. First off, let me reiterate, this was not the quarter that we wanted or expected. And any underperformance in our business, particularly on a tentpole franchise like FC we take very, very seriously. As I think about answering the question, the thing I want to reiterate that's really important is this will still be an incredibly big FC. It will in all likelihood be the 2nd largest FC in the history of the franchise coming off 2 years of record growth. I actually think that's a big part of why we may have seen the ebb at least in the acquisition level in the business. As we look across the industry, it's not a net to see ebbs from time to time. Typically, they are of significantly greater magnitude than what we experienced with Fc be that as it may when you have a franchise as big as FC is, even a small deviation from our expectations can have a pretty dramatic impact on our quarter as we saw in Q3. As we look at the top of the funnel, again, we had over 40,000,000 people playing across iterations. And I think we had an exceptional game in 2023 with with 2 World Cups and a December World Cup in the year which brought in a lot of new players.

We then had the launch of our owned brand EA Sports FC that we invested meaningfully behind at a marketing level to bring in new players. And at some level, I think that many of those players were very satisfied with the games they were playing.

And one of the things that we recognize is that we have to do a better job of bringing those new players across. Our latest version of FC is far and away the best version that we've ever built. It won Game of the Year and widely regarded across almost all cohorts to be an exceptional game. And we just have to do better at bringing our players who are in the ecosystem across to the new version And certainly with the work that the teams has done since then, we've seen meaningful progress on that metric. The second part of it that we talked about inside of the prepared remarks is the highly competitive cohort that lapsed later into the quarter. And again, as we think about managing these massive online communities and these live service driven businesses, we're always tweaking and tuning based on player feedback. Again, we have an incredible player community across the globe that invests meaningful amounts of time in these experiences. This year, we started to hear kind of as the quarter progressed that the tuning of the gameplay, particularly for this highly competitive cohort, felt more defensively focused than past iterations. And they were asking for a more open aggressive attacking version of football.

Our teams do what our teams do best, which is listen closely to the core community and validated what they were hearing and then began to tweak and tune and test gameplay in advance of what was perhaps the most major gameplay update we've ever done in the history of the franchise ahead of our January 16th event. The good news for us and certainly the good news for our player community is that game update was very well received by that cohort And again, combined with the activities that we were undertaking to bring players in past iterations across, we saw incredible momentum going into Team of the Year event. Just some core stats as we came out of that weekend, We had record net bookings for the team of the year event. We had record weekly active users over the events weekend.

Prior to the update, our competitive cohort engagement was down high single digits post update clearly trending back prior to to prior year levels We had positive trends across all cohorts, so not just that highly competitive cohort, we started to see all cohorts come across. We reactivated 2,000,000 Ultimate Team players with all acquisition cohorts experiencing positive trends And we're still seeing that momentum progress into this past weekend's Future Stars event. So again, not the the quarter that we wanted or expected, not unnatural for massive online communities to have these ebbs. I think our teams demonstrated their commitment to our player base and the resilience of their business in both targeting acquisition top of funnel and engagement deeper into the experience and the momentum that we see coming out of these events going into the rest of the quarter into FY26 feels very strong to us. Perhaps I'll let Stuart add a little bit from a financial standpoint.

Andrew, just to kind of wrap that out a little bit how we think about that reflecting in the Q4 guide. We did put into the script that we did reflect through low double digit declines at the midpoint. As you heard Andrew just talk through some of those stats and we obviously did the pre announcement, we were 4 days into team of the year, it represents roughly 25 percent of the quarter. And we saw net bookings significantly trend up year over year for the event. So just flagging here that not considering the guide is that if that momentum should continue through 6 odd weeks at the end of the quarter through the events and all the actions we have planned that would not be factored into that midpoint. And thus it should provide momentum for us Q4 and then heading into FY 'twenty 6.

Well, thank you for all of that. Really appreciate the detail there. And if I could maybe sneak in one more really quick. Of course, still very early, but how has that community reception to the Battlefield Lab announcement been relative to your expectations or hopes? And how have the last couple of Battlefield releases informed this pre launch cycle? Looks like you're bringing players along in a more meaningful fashion than usual. Thanks.

Yes, another great question. I would say the response to the Playtest and the Battlefield Labs initiative has been overwhelmingly positive and well beyond our expectations, which is great. It's demonstrative of just the fan love out there for this story franchise.

There's really 2 big reasons why our team is taking this approach. The first is, as I think you talked about, there is some trepidation amongst the core community as to what this battlefield will be. Battlefield is this incredible franchise [indiscernible] destruction and vehicles and all kinds of things and as much love in the community. The last two iterations of Battlefield have not resonated as strongly and have been found wanting by meaningful parts of the community globally. And so we do appreciate and understand that there is some trepidation there. And this development team The biggest development team we've ever had is committed to working very close with our players to ensure that they understand what we're doing they feed into the tuning and balancing at scale of this game. The second reason is it is the biggest battlefield we will ever build. Or at least we have ever built to date.

It exists on an incredible scale both in terms of breadth and depth of gameplay in terms of access points, in terms of way that you can play this game And a big part of the modern development process that the team is taking is to test and tune everything to ensure that even as we launch something of this scale, it launches both stable and secure. And I think the combination of those two things is driving this initiative, which is Battlefield Labs and and the the way that community has responded has been very positive to date.

Your next question comes from the line of Doug Creutz of TD Cowen. Your line is open. Hey, thanks. I was wondering if you could talk about how the kind of Apex Legends work is going to getting it back to where you want it to be? I know back in August, you had talked about some of the initiatives that you've taken and just kind of what's the progress update? What's worked? What hasn't worked? And where do you think see things going from here? Thank you.

Apex is this incredibly storied franchise. I know I speak so lovingly and patiently about all of our franchise, our true truly believe we have some of the great franchises in entertainment And I know our teams are incredibly committed to them in service of our player communities. Apex is probably one of the great new launches in our industry over the last decade and has been loved by that core cohort. We've had over 200,000,000 people play the game. However, the trajectory of the business of that franchise has not been headed in the direction that we have wanted for some time. I think you highlight we have been trying, tuning and testing many things in the context of the ongoing support of the community. As we think about Apex today, really think about the development happening across 3 core vectors. The first is how do we continue to support this incredible community that plays the game day in and day out, which numbers tens of millions of people And that's both quality of life anti cheat, and all of the things that make the core experience great as well as the creation of new content for that community.

And we continue to try and test and develop more and great content for that community And I would say we have seen some progress in that, but probably not as much as we would have liked. The second phase, I think I've talked about this before, is we do believe there will be a time where we need to do a more meaningful update of Apex as a broad game experience. And the team is diligently working on that. You should imagine we probably wouldn't drop that on top of a Battlefield launch And so from a timing standpoint, our thinking right now is that that would exist post Battlefield And then on a longer term time horizon, again, these franchises that exist at this level and have this much fan love don't come along all that often. What I think we've demonstrated as a company is an ability to build franchises that last 10, 20, 30 years and growing. Our expectation is that Apex will be also one of those franchises and at some time on a longer term time horizon, there will be a an even bigger, more meaningful update to that broader game experience. And Apex 2.0, if you will.

This will not be the final incarnation of Apex. So the team remains [indiscernible] We continue to invest behind the core community who continues to play that numbers in the tens of millions of players We do believe that there should be a more major update that will probably happen after a Battlefield launch. Just in terms of timing and the team is diligently working through what that would be. And then longer term, our expectation is that we'll continue to expand what this franchise is and how we support a core community of highly competitive players and new communities that want to come and experience all the greatness that Apex has to offer.

Doug, I'll just wrap a couple of things on there on financials in around everything Andrew just outlined. Q3 was largely in line with expectations we set out albeit down year on year.

We have started to see some sequential improvement with strength in sort of player conversion and monetization. The content enhancements and some of the changes in the Battle Pass have started to shift where we're seeing more spend uptick against the Battle Pass than in previous seasons as we've come through 2018 through 2021. The outlook for Q4 remains largely unchanged at this point. We obviously look forward to Season 24 next week.

Great. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Chris Schulte of UBS. Your line is open. Great. Thank you. Appreciate the update on Battle timing. Seemingly, the industry pipeline could be crowded with a number of major titles being released this year. Can you just remind us how the pipeline for your peers influences your willingness to launch titles in close proximity? And maybe just one more industry question, given the anticipation for the new Switch console, any thoughts on what opportunity this might present for your IP and the ability to expand the level of collaboration beyond what you've done today? Thank you.

Great question. Certainly, we exist in a competitive marketplace. I've had the great fortune being in this company for 25 years and we have done an a great job of competing with all of our great franchises over time. That being said, we've invested more in this battle field than any battlefield before. We have 4 studios. We've had a meaningful amount of time. We're looking for this to be the biggest battlefield we've ever made. And we, of course, want to make sure that we launch that into a window where we can deliver on the fullness of the promise of what Battlefield can be and grow the community to a level that is commensurate with the size of the game that we're making. I do believe that this year might be a nuanced year relative to competition. There may be some things happening in the year that may cause us to think differently about our launch timing. We have an FY 'twenty six launch window that the team is targeting. We believe the game will be great and ready at that time. But if we got close to that timeframe and believe this wasn't going to be a great window for us, then we would we would take a look at what an alternate window might be that would give us the appropriate time, energy and player acquisition opportunity for this Battlefield to be all that it needed to be.

And Chris, just to add on to that, I think it's important to say it's probably why we've discussed and shared the multi year framework that we laid out last year. To account to give us the flexibility to think about a potential range of growth rates that could occur depending on market dynamics and timing that Andrew alluded to for our own pipeline We'll also give greater clarity in FY 'twenty six guidance on our Q4 Q4 call.

But the growth is really built around the conviction we have around the pipeline. If you think about we expect FC to rebound through next year. We obviously have college football we just announced in January coming out in the summer. We have an exciting year, so on the lifestyle brands. We've talked to skate obviously continue to expand on The Sims. We've just talked with Battlefield, as Andrew, a second ago, and obviously we'll continue to balance all of that with the industry slate we have up ahead. But I think just important to remind we have that multiyear framework out is what we remain committed and aligned against. And again, growth in 'twenty six, but that range of growth will depend on timing.

And then to the second part of your question around a new console, anytime a new console comes into the marketplace, that's of a benefit to us. It gives us the ability to act access and acquire new players Typically, we've had franchises perform very well on Nintendo platforms. Certainly, our expectation is that might find real energy on the platform as they have done in the past. When you think about something like The Sims and the My Sims Cozy Bundle, which performed well ahead of our expectations, 50% of all players were new to EA. That represents a great opportunity for us. So again, nothing in our models at this juncture but our expectation is that anytime a great new console comes into the marketplace, that gives us access to new players and new communities, that we have the IP that will benefit from that. Great. That was very helpful. Thank you for the color. Your next question comes from the line of Clay Griffin of MoffettNathanson. Your line is open. Great. Thank you. Sorry, I've had some technical issues. So I apologize if this But Andrew, I wanted to come back to FC, if I could. You spoke very positively about Rush in October.

Understanding that engagement had sort of slipped beyond what you guys thought throughout the quarter. But just curious just if you could provide some context around how that mode, the introduction of that mode might have played a role in the trends that you saw or maybe just kind of general commentary about how you think that mode evolves from here And then I've got a follow-up. Yes, great question. One of the advancements of Rush over what had been a similar type of mode and I think there may have been some confusion outside of the FC community, Volto, which was a small sided football mode was very separate Rush actually permeated many different aspects of the game. It turns out it's the 2nd most played mode in the game. And it actually hasn't been diluted to monetization. Overall, we believe that ultimately it will be additive to monetization. I truly believe that what the team is doing there investing in fast paced socially driven gameplay is a meaningful part of the advancement of the franchise And certainly the platform beyond what has been typical 11 on 11 competition and the community has responded very well to that. Again, I would come back to I believe that we can attribute the softness in Q3 to top of funnel acquisition that we've been targeting meaningfully since then and seeing very positive trends and some gameplay balancing and tuning that the teams addressed in that meaningful player update right before the January 16th event of which has also generated very positive trends.

And so overall, I think Rush is a net positive to the franchise both now and certainly over the long term.

Great. And then I had read some interesting theories on server delay, desync and just sort of the general kind of server availability and caching as [indiscernible] Causing you guys some issues here in FC 25, I certainly would not have suspected that to be a meaningful year of your driver per se.

But can you speak to that idea? And if that's true, what needs to get fixed and on what timeline?

Certainly, again, we listen and interact with all members of our community. Our role is always serve every aspect and ensure a high quality, stable, secure gaming From our standpoint, the data that we see would suggest this is incredibly stable. FC At least as stable and likely more stable than FCs in the past. That doesn't mean that server issues don't happen from time to time and that we don't need to go and address them.

That's generally the normal course of business. And I would say it's very low in terms of overall player impact. And quality of life within the player experience.

Makes sense.

Thanks.

Your last question comes from the line of Mike Hickey of Benchmark Company. Your line is open.

Andrew, Stuart. Thanks for taking our questions. Just 2, one, it's good to see or hear the expected growth for fiscal 'twenty 6. Just curious, if you think you can grow that year without the release of Battlefield And the second question on college football, obviously massive success to you and your teams. Also, I think there was the feeling that there's a fair amount of pent up demand and they have been driving sort of outsized growth from that game. So just curious how you think about the ability to grow college football in fiscal 'twenty 6 and maybe your your American Football, I guess, overall now as an ecosystem? Thanks, guys.

Mike, may I take the first part and sort of the broader context? Yes, in short, we expect the growth in 2026 to be part of the broader pipeline initiative, which obviously includes Battlefield and even would exclude Battlefield. When you think about some of the things I just outlined earlier, we expect to continue to build with FC. As soon as we head towards the World Cup year in North America towards the back end of the fiscal and into 'twenty seven. We've talked about the launch of Skate through the summer. The continued expansion we've outlined for Sims and we talked some of that on the call today as we continue expand the audience and platforms that we address [indiscernible] returning in the summer of 20s. We look to build on that both the American Football ecosystem across both Madden and college, know that we continue to push online live services across the rest of the portfolio in the year. So So yes, again, coming back to before, we do expect to grow in 20 6. We are cognizant there may be a range of that scale of growth. Hence, we push through that multiyear framework through 'twenty six and 'twenty seven to kind of smooth out the element of timing Obviously, set a benchmark where we believe we can drive the business over the next 12 months to 24 months.

On college, yes, it was an exceptional year on college. And there was almost certainly meaningful pent up demand in the context of people coming into that. But a few things are also true. One is that when you put 12,000 young athletes into the game, they are incredible ambassadors for the franchise they are part of 2, the sport of college football is reaching new heights. As we see the machinations of championship level, our expectation is the sport in and of itself is going to continue to grow When combined with what's happened with the NFL, which also continues to grow and we're now seeing it grow into new days and new categories. Certainly as part of Amazon, the Christmas Day games of Netflix were an incredible boon for the NFL. So when we think about American Football in totality, and our ability to deliver [indiscernible] content, experiences, that harness the power and the passion of that American football community across both college and the NFL where both of those sports are growing meaningfully, and we get a compounding effect by really merging the communities together and allowing them to move seamlessly through both products and grow on a year over year basis both in the context of competition, but also in collaboration deep social connection and user generated content creation we actually believe that we're at the very early stages of what could be our next great massive online community one that will continue to grow in the way that FC has done over the past few years.

So net net, we feel very good about where we're at with college football and our ability to grow the overall American football business on a year over year basis.

Okay.

So, well, thank you all for your excellent questions. As you've heard me say, interactive entertainment, it's constantly evolving. Shaped by changing player expectations. Our teams remain agile, highly focused and adaptable, responding swiftly to market dynamics and player feedback. Looking ahead, we've never had a stronger pipeline of entertainment experiences including the launch of Battlefield and Skate in FY 'twenty 6.

We're accelerating our vision for the EA Sports app and we The future has never been more exciting and we are confident in our ability to deliver drive long term value for our stockholders and most importantly create incredible experiences that players across the world love. Thank you. We look forward to talking to you next quarter.

That concludes today's meeting.

Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.