Electronic Arts Inc.

Good afternoon. My name is Christine, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Electronic Arts Q1 2020 Earnings Conference Call. Mr. Chris Evenden, VP of Investor Relations, you may begin your conference.

Thanks, Christine. Welcome to EA's first quarter fiscal 2020 earnings call. With me on the call today are Andrew Wilson, our CEO, and Blake Jorgensen, our CFO and COO. Please note that our SEC filings and our earnings released are available at ir.ea.com. In addition, we've posted earnings slides to accompany our prepared remarks. Lastly, after this call, we will post our prepared remarks, an audio replay of this call, our financial model, a transcript, and an updated accounting FAQ. With regards to our calendar, our annual shareholder meeting will take place on Thursday, August the 8th here in Millwood Shores, and our Q2 fiscal 2020 earnings call is scheduled for Tuesday, October the 29th. This presentation and our comments include forward-looking statements regarding future events and the future financial performance of the company. Actual events and results may differ materially from our expectations. We refer you to our most recent Form 10-K for a discussion of risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed today. Electronic Arts makes these statements as of today, July 30th, 2019, and disclaims any duty to update During this call, the financial metrics, with the exception of a free cash flag, will be presented on a gap basis. All comparisons made in the course of this call are against the same period in the prior year and are otherwise stated. Now, I'll turn the call over to Andrew.

Thanks, Chris. We delivered a strong start to FY20. Players were deeply engaged in our top franchises, with growing communities reaching new peaks of engagement, fueled by content and in-game events in our live services. As a result, our operating results significantly exceeded our expectations for the first quarter. We're thrilled by the great experiences that players are having in our games and we're looking forward to delivering a lot more throughout the fiscal year. Interactive entertainment continues to grow and expanding global player base entail wins for the industry. With this backdrop, the core drives of growth for EAR the depth and breadth of our portfolio and IP, our expertise in live services, our leadership in subscriptions, and competitive gaming that expands our reach and drives deeper engagement. We're also continually strengthening our foundation of great talent and technology. I'll touch on some of these drivers with a few highlights here. Let's start with Apex Legends. We have a massive global audience continuing to engage in this high-quality, free-to-play experience. Apex has tremendous gameplay at its core. and we've built it to have longevity as a live service that will continue to drive engagement over time. In our live service, we're delivering seasons of new content, a collection of new content and updates that begin to roll out at the start of each season and continue throughout the course of several weeks and months. We launched Season 2 in early July, including a robust Battle Pass offering, a new character, and additions to the environment. And to date, it has outperformed our expectations with significant growth in daily and weekly active players. In each season, there are in-game events that are additional drivers of engagement, such as the event coming in the next few weeks that will bring new content and deliver one of the most fan-requested features since the launch of Apex. There will be more updates and in-game experiences in the weeks to come for Season 2 and Season 3 is shaping up to be even bigger. All of these elements, the fantastic core gameplay, seasons of new content, and additional in-game events are designed to continually excite and engage the Apex community over the long term. We're also expanding into additional growth opportunities for Apex Legends. Esports will bring new drivers of social interaction and competition to the Apex ecosystem. Interest from teams, broadcast partners, and sponsors is strong, and we've had great success with our first exhibition events including a competition at the ESPYs that was broadcast on ESPN and ABC. We'll have around 80 teams from around the world participating in our first official competition in September. Our plans to bring Apex Legends to China and a worldwide mobile launch are also on course, and we will share more on our plans in the future. In our EA Sports portfolio, our franchises like Madden NFL and FIFA are delivering for core fans, innovating to reach new players and leading our growth in esports. Looking first at Madden NFL, we continue to see deep year-round engagement in the franchise. Live service events and tie-in content with the NFL Draft drove growth in new players joining Madden NFL 19 in Q1, and also deepened engagement in Madden Ultimate Team. We're now just days away from launching Madden NFL 20. The innovation in this year's game, like the new superstar X-Factor abilities, new personalized career campaign, and the more fluid core gameplay are all designed to appeal to new and existing football fans. Madden NFL Esports also continues to drive growing viewership. Players in our Madden NFL competitive ecosystem engaged four times more than non-competitors last season, and our events drove record broadcast and digital viewership. We're now looking to build on that success with the Madden NFL 20 Championship Series. We're partnered with all 32 NFL teams, our competitions are aligned with key beats in the NFL season, and we're welcoming major sponsors, including Pizza Hut, Snickers, and Starbucks. Finally, the latest season of our fan-favorite Madden NFL mobile game launches tomorrow. And this year, the game is bringing back some of the classic modes that fans love, as well as new innovation in social co-op play and customization. Through great experiences on console and PC, the ever-popular Madden NFL mobile game, and our leading esports programming, Madden NFL continues to reach and engage a wide audience of fans. Our FIFA franchise had a very strong Q1, with players deeply engaged in our ultimate team live service. Our biggest in-game event, Team of the Season, had more than 3 million players logging in daily to play. The highest daily levels we've ever seen for this event. Esports for FIFA is exploding as well, with our competitive modes growing faster than any other mode in FUT. Momentum is strong across our entire FIFA esports ecosystem, and next week's FIFA eWorld Cup finals will be the culmination of a season that has engaged 17 official league partners, players from 20 different nations, more than 30 live events, and more than 60 million total views to date. Looking ahead to September, FIFA 20 is set to expand our FIFA platform with a brand new dimension of the game for players who want more personalisation, customisation and community. Volta Football brings a street soccer experience to the franchise, where players can build their own characters, express themselves and play different forms of the sport in different environments around the world. That's in addition to major advancements in the core experience designed to deliver the most authentic football gameplay we've ever produced. FIFA 20 will have an unmatched breadth of top leagues, teams and players included in the game, a continuing differentiator of the authenticity in our FIFA franchise. Our licensing program is built on the strength of multi-year relationships and careful consideration of the most important players, teams and leagues that our fans love to see in the game. From console to PC, to our FIFA mobile games in the West and China, to our FIFA online offerings in Asia, FIFA continues to be the way that hundreds of millions of players around the world come together in their shared passion for soccer. Our Sims 4 live service also continues to be a rich and rewarding experience for our players and a strong platform for growth. The Sims 4 continues to be one of the great owned IP success stories of our portfolio and we're planning for FY20 to be our biggest year yet of new content. Knowing that, we gave more fans a chance to get into the game through a one-week promotion in May to download the base game for free. Almost 7 million players downloaded the game during that time. In addition to the base game promotion, total expansion and game pack downloads also increased 55% year-over-year in Q1. We launched our seventh expansion pack, Island Living, in late June, and it has already become one of the best-selling packs for The Sims 4. We are fortunate to have an incredibly vibrant and creative Sims community on console, PC, and mobile, and we're continuing to double down on this amazing franchise to reach new players and open up exciting new dimensions of The Sims this year. Subscription services are expanding across the industry as well. We're a pioneer and a leader in this space, having just launched our subscription on a third major platform with EA Access on the Sony PlayStation 4. We believe subscriptions can be transformative to the player experience and the gaming industry over the long term as they offer tremendous value and choice to players and greater flexibility in the games we bring to market. Our PC subscription already includes more than 220 games, 140 of which are from third-party developers. We're continually adding to this with new games from EA from indie developers seeking to expand their reach through our EA Originals program and from our third-party partners ready to reach more players through our services. We're also working to expand our subscriptions to even more platforms. Mobile continues to be a growth opportunity for us. Live services are a key aspect of our mobile business with franchises like Madden Mobile, FIFA Mobile and The Sims continue to drive strong ongoing engagement. Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes has grown to nearly 80 million players live to date. Galaxy of Heroes has the most deeply engaged community of all of our mobile games, and we plan to continue delivering great new content and in-game events to grow the audience this year. We've also just started pre-output testing for Plants vs. Zombies 3. In a market where discovery and acquisition can be challenging, Plants vs. Zombies is one of the most beloved brands in gaming. To date, we've had more than a billion downloads worldwide of PvZ games on mobile, and we're looking forward to bringing something new to fans around the world. We'll continue to prototype and develop more bespoke mobile projects, as well as new content for cross-platform play. The mobile space is complex and competitive, and our focus is on bringing more innovation and unique new experiences to mobile players. In addition to the franchise and live service that I've already mentioned, we'll be delivering many other new experiences to players throughout the remainder of this fiscal year. NHL 20 is launching in Q2, with hundreds of gameplay advancements, as well as new competitive and multiplayer modes. We'll take the wraps off our new Need for Speed game heading into Gamescom in a few weeks. We have a Plants vs. Zombies shooter title coming to console and PC later this year. And the excitement and anticipation for Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order has been strong coming out of EA Play and E3, where the game received 45 award nominations and great buzz from the player community. Respawn's track record speaks for the high-quality games they developed. and they have created a brand new Star Wars story that will be a lot of fun to play when it launches this holiday. From the cool game to live services that extend and enhance the experience to new ways to engage through subscriptions and competitive gaming, our focus continues to be on strong execution and delivering innovation, quality, and fun for players at every turn. We're fortunate to have some of the greatest and most creative talent in the industry, driving our efforts to continually learn and improve. With robust, best-in-class technology powering our efforts, we're also in a position to scale and evolve with the changing needs of our players. Now, I'll turn the call over to Blake.