Electronic Arts Inc.

Oh, my God. THE END THE END THE END Thank you. THE END Thank you. THE END Thank you. THE END Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon, my name is Mika and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Electronic Arts Q3 2022 Earnings Conference Call. Mr. Chris Evanson, VP of Investor Relations, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Mika. Welcome to EA's third quarter fiscal 2022 earnings call. With me on the call are Andrew Wilson, our CEO, and Blake Jolvinson, our CFO. Please note that our SEC filings of our earnings release are available at ir.ea.com. In addition, we have posted detailed earnings slides to accompany our prepared remarks. And lastly, after the call, we will post our prepared remarks, an audio replay of this call, our financial model, and a transcript. With regards to our calendar, our Q4 fiscal 2022 earnings call is scheduled for Tuesday, May the 10th. And as a reminder, we post the schedule of our entire fiscal year of upcoming earnings calls on our IR website. This presentation and our comments include forward-looking statements regarding future events and the future financial performance of the company. Actual events and the results may differ materially from our expectations. We refer you to our most recent Form 10-Q 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, February 1, 2022, and disclaims any duty to update. During this call, the financial metrics, with the exception of free cash flow, will be presented on a gap basis. All comparisons made in the course of this call are against the same period and prior year, and that's otherwise stated. Now I'll turn the call over to Andrew. Thanks, Chris.

I hope all of you and your families and loved ones are staying healthy. Let me first say thank you to our talented teams at Electronic Arts, all 12,000 people putting so much energy every day into doing amazing things for our players. As we begin, I'd also like to say a few words about John Martin. John's passing was a tremendous loss to the American football community, for the sports world at large, and for all of us electronic arts. Through his years as a winning coach, as a beloved broadcaster, and as the pioneering namesake of our game, Coach Madden was football for tens of millions of fans. He taught us many things over nearly 35 years of partnership. Some of his most important lessons, including authenticity, are things we've held close to EA Sports ever since. We feel incredibly fortunate to have been part of Coach's legacy and just as fortunate to be part of how it will live on through the future of our Madden NFL games. We'll have more to share about how we are honoring Coach Madden in the weeks ahead. And from all of us electronic arts, our thoughts and sympathies continue to be with his family, friends, and many, many fans. It has been a year of outstanding growth so far in FY22. Q3 was a record quarter, with our live services and mobile portfolio delivering strong reoccurring revenue and year-over-year growth. Our franchises like Apex Legends, our EA Sports titles, The Sims, and more have universal appeal. And as we expand to more ways to play across more platforms and business models, we are growing our total players, engagement, net bookings, and underlying profitability. We didn't have a challenging Q3, as the launch of Battlefield 2042 did not meet expectations. Battlefield 2042 was always an ambitious game, and our team's push to innovate across many dimensions, including massive scale and 128 player matches, new modes, new dynamic gameplay, and more. Developing this game without teams working from home for nearly two years ultimately proved to be challenging. Through our process for testing and preparation, we believe the experience is ready to be put in our players' hands. We launched with strong stability. However, as more players experienced the full game, it became clear that there were unanticipated performance issues that we would need to address. Some of the design choices we made with the game also did not resonate with everyone in our community. We are fully committed to realising the full potential of this game and fully committed to our battlefield fans. we've already implemented a series of major updates to the game, and there is more to be done. Players can expect meaningful updates to continue in the weeks ahead, and we are shifting the first season of live service content to early summer as we work closely with our community to evolve and improve the core experience in Battlefield 2042. Despite Battlefield's mis-against-our-expectations, with the strength of our business, we are continuing to deliver record growth and performance in FY22. With Battlefield's performance to date and our decision to move the first season of live service into Q1 FY23 so we can focus on the core experience, we've adjusted our full year net bookings guidance to $7.525 billion, which remains $225 million above our original net bookings guidance for FY22. On the strength of our live services, operational discipline, and continuing digital transformation, we're reaffirming our full year expectations for underlying profitability. We expect strong growth to continue in FY23. Looking across our portfolio, we saw continuing year-over-year growth in total players, engagement, net bookings, cash flow, and underlying profitability in Q3. I'll touch on each of those pieces here. Beginning with total players, our games and experiences connect a global network that continues to scale. Over the last year, our network has grown to more than 540 million unique active accounts across more than 18 games and 25 live services, spanning all major platforms from console to PC to mobile and cloud. From an engagement standpoint, more players are spending more time in our titles. Looking across our portfolio on all platforms, we've had more than 180 million monthly active accounts on average in our games during FY22. Apex Legends monthly active players are up more than 30% year-over-year in Q3, and across our combined EA Sports portfolio, monthly active players are also growing year-over-year. Engagement is deepening as well, with players spending nearly 20% more time in games across our portfolio in FY22 compared to the previous year. Growth in our network and engagement continues to drive growth in our business. With our top franchises delivering strong recurring revenue, our net bookings for Q3 grew 7.4% year-over-year for the quarter, and the full year we project 22% growth in net bookings over the last year. Performance across the business and operational discipline also continue to deliver strong cash flow and underlying profitability growth in Q3. The continued growth is anchored by proven franchises where we have a strong track record for execution. Apex Legends is now one of the biggest and most successful ongoing live services in the industry and is built on our owned IP. With more than 28 million new players joining the last year and new seasons and in-game events that continue to deliver new experiences to a deeply engaged community, FY22 is the biggest year yet for Apex. Average player investment in the game has grown significantly year over year and we expect to expand and we continue to expect net bookings for Apex to approach 1 billion in FY22. We are expanding to reach more players and viewers with new original content on the way. Our growing Apex Legends esports ecosystem and Apex Legends Mobile will soon be moving into soft launch as we continue our worldwide rollout. We've had strong engagement and community feedback during closed beta testing, and we're excited for more players to experience Apex Legends Mobile soon. Mobile is a core growth engine for us, and it is accelerating. With new launches and acquired expertise in technologies leveraged across our portfolio, we expect mobile to be a major catalyst in FY23 with growth well into the double digits. Led by Apex Mobile, a newly updated FIFA mobile game, Golf Clash, and more unannounced projects, we are expanding our portfolio of more than 15 top mobile live services to reach new audiences and grow our recurring revenue. EA Sports is a powerhouse in the sports and entertainment world. We've driven hundreds of millions of dollars in net bookings growth year-to-date, with our EA Sports business up nearly 10% year-over-year. We continue to see incredible growth for the future of global soccer, and our global soccer franchise was the number one title in the Western world in calendar 2021. Madden NFL 22 was the number one sports title in the US during the holiday period, and it was the number three top-selling game in the US for all of last year. Under our leadership, F1 2021 also continues to perform well above expectations, with unit sales nearly doubling year over year during the holiday period. In our mobile sports portfolio, we just launched the latest version of our EA Sports FIFA mobile game around the world. This was the biggest update to the game ever, and early performance has been exceptional. Engagement is up more than 50% over the previous season, and retention in the first week is nearly double. With the added expertise of Playdemic and Gloob, and a deep pipeline of new sports experiences in development, EA Sports continues to be an exceptional growth business, built on predictable and recurring revenue with outstanding opportunities ahead. Our pipeline further amplifies our strength. In addition to our core franchise, we are building new experiences in some of the biggest enduring IP in entertainment. Last week, we announced a new agreement with Disney and Lucasfilm Games to develop new experiences in the Star Wars universe. continuing our collaboration of more than a decade. Respawn is leading development of the next game in our action-adventure Star Wars Jedi series, as well as two additional Star Wars titles. This adds to our deep pipeline of announced and unannounced projects with our wholly owned IP, including Need for Speed, our Bioware franchises, The Sims, Skate, Dead Space, and more. Looking ahead, we're continuing to build on the structural advantages of our portfolio and accelerating growth by executing against our core strategy. We are focused on creating amazing games and content, providing creation tools for the community to engage more deeply with our experiences, aggregating and distributing our content experiences to more players on more platforms in more geographies and more business models, and harnessing the power of the social ecosystem in and around our games. The demand for amazing games and new ways to play, watch, share, and create has never been stronger. And one of the industry's largest, most profitable businesses with strong recurring revenue, we are well-positioned to take advantage of this continued secular growth. We look forward to delivering against these opportunities through FY23 and beyond. Now, I'll hand the call over to Blake.

Thanks, Andrew. Q3 was a quarter that demonstrated the strength of our live services portfolio. Despite a tough Battlefield launch, we came within a couple of percent of our net booking guidance and beat our expectations for underlying profitability. The quarter was the largest in our company's history for net bookings, underlying profitability, and cash generation. Sales of Battlefield 2042 were disappointing, but they are offset by a strong showing from FIFA and continued strength from Apex and our other franchises. We delivered net revenue of $1.79 billion and net bookings of $2.58 billion. FIFA 22's strong start continued into this quarter, with unit sales now up double digits over last year, launched to date. And players continue to engage in FIFA Ultimate Team and invest in their teams. This has made it the strongest FIFA launch ever measured from launch to the end of Q3. Apex Legends net bookings continues to grow at an extraordinary rate and will deliver close to $1 billion for the year. Digital represents 64% of our full game units sold through on a trailing 12-month basis, up 2 percentage points from last year. The strong digital mix for full game sales, aided by growth in live services, pushed underlying Q3 gross margins 2.3 percentage points above last year. Operating expenses, which include recent acquisition costs, came in below our expectations, driven by variable compensation and savings and phasing of marketing spending. It's worth noting that we were able to hire more people than in any other quarter in our history, and we're continuing to invest in our game teams. We now expect fiscal 2022 gap net revenue to be $6.925 billion, cost of revenue to be $1.844 billion, and earnings per share of $2.43, up from our original expectation of $1.34. We are taking our net bookings guidance for the year to $7.52 billion, Although a $100 million reduction on our position at the end of Q2, it is still $225 million above our original guidance for the year. The reduction is driven by Battlefield 2042 in both Q3 and Q4, but offset by the strength in the rest of our business, particularly in FIFA and Apex Legends. We're committed to turning Battlefield around and building a sustainable live service even if some of the actions we're taking, like moving the first season into FY23, impact net bookings for the short term. Reflecting the strength of our portfolio, our operating cash flow guidance is now $1.9 billion. This would be close to the largest full-year operating cash flow in a company's history, despite nearly $200 million of one-time tax payments related to acquisitions this year. With capital expenditure still around $200 million, that would deliver a free cash flow of $1.7 billion. Note that this is $200 million above our original expectations for FY22 free cash flow. See our earnings slides and press release for further cash flow information. For the fourth quarter, we expect GAAP net revenue of $1.759 billion. cost of revenue to be $404 million, and operating expenses of $1.086 billion. This results in an earnings per share of 46 cents for the fourth quarter. We expect Q4 fiscal 2022 net bookings to be $1.761 billion. This would be our largest Q4 ever, even if we only count organic growth. We'll formally guide FY23 in May when we report Q4. But we've heard that some of you are concerned that the battlefield performance might impact next year's growth. Let me emphasize here again that we are a portfolio company. As originally forecast, the battlefield franchise would have accounted for significantly less than 10% of this year's net bookings and well below 5% of next year's. We're revising those numbers, but you can see it has little impact on FY23 growth. The main drivers of growth next year remain FIFA on console, Apex Legends, Apex Mobile, and FIFA Mobile. Golf Clash will also contribute to year-on-year growth since we acquired Playdemic halfway through the year. With regard to new launches in FY23, we've disclosed that Need for Speed is on the slate and we'll announce more titles closer to the time. In total, we still expect mid to high single-digit growth next year. To summarize, we just delivered the largest quarter in the company's history. FIFA goes from strength to strength. Apex Legends continues to show extraordinary growth. Battlefield disappointed, but our broad portfolio of games and live services insulates us from the impact of any one title. Our portfolio approaches... approach enables us to deliver double-digit organic growth this year and continue to deliver strong cash flow and provide a strong foundation for growth as we look to the future. Before I hand the call to Andrew, you may have noticed that yesterday we announced a new CFO for the company. And I think the new CFO, Chris, is going to be a fabulous addition and will do a much better job probably than I've ever done. I thank Andrew and the team of our executives as well as the entire company for the amazing partnership that I've had here for nine and a half years at EA. It has been the most enjoyable experience of my entire career. I also thank the buy side and sell side analysts and partners for all of their support over the years. and wonderful interaction. And last but not least, I thank Chris Eviden, Aaron Ream, and Fabiola for their amazing IR performance that interacts with all of you. So now I'll have you call back to enter.

Thank you, Blake. These are exciting times in our industry. Interactive entertainment continues to grow by every measure, and our audiences are expanding and diversifying. Major franchises are at the center of culture and entertainment, and the world is recognizing how games have the power to connect global communities. Our focus continues to be on our people, our players, and our amazing portfolio of games, content, and services, and extraordinary growth opportunities in the future. Thanks to our incredibly talented teams in electronic arts, we are delivering entertainment to hundreds of millions of people around the world and connecting them through some of the most powerful, enduring franchises. With the breadth and depth of our business that continues to expand our network, deepen engagement, and drive growth in our recurring net bookings and ongoing profitability, we are well positioned strategically to continue building on our success and delivering for our players. As we look ahead, and as Blake just referenced, we were excited to announce yesterday that Chris is joining Electronic Arts as our next CFO. Chris is coming to us after more than 25 years at Microsoft, where he served as Corporate Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of the Cloud and AI Group, which he led with incredible success during Microsoft's transformation to a cloud-first company. We have a big vision for the future, and in addition to Chris's financial leadership of our organization, I look forward to having him as a strategic partner with extensive experience driving scale and growth to help us achieve our goals. As we've announced previously, Blake will be leading our team after nearly a decade of leadership and partnership at EA. Blake has been an incredible leader, partner, and advisor. But most importantly, he is a dear friend, and I feel deeply grateful for our time working together. His expertise and the team he has built have been instrumental in our growth and financial achievements, and have positioned us well for continued success. Blake will remain with us until the summer to assist with with the transition and special projects. Thank you, Blake, for everything you've done and continue to do for our company. And again, thank you for your friendship. Now we're here for your questions.

As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. To withdraw your question or if your question has been answered, press the pound or touch. Your first question comes from the line of Benjamin Soft from Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open.

Hey guys, just a quick thank you to Blake for being a great partner and looking forward to meeting Chris. Two questions. So first, just around Battlefield, can you guys sort of frame for us how you think about the vision for the future of that franchise and in particular how the new leadership for the Battlefield team is thinking about expanding and adapting that franchise over time? And then I've got a second question.

Yeah, great question. Again, you know, we have very bold vision for where this franchise goes. This franchise has always led the category in creativity, innovation, scale, gameplay, community. And as we came into launch, you know, again, we had a very bold vision for this game. As it turns out, we've had some challenges, you know, not least of all trying to build this game and find this game from home. And so our focus now is really making sure that core experience lives up to our fans and the community's expectations. Beyond that, we'll continue to invest and grow the franchise. We have great leadership with Vince and Byron and others you know, with tremendous background from other great shooters in the industry, kind of leading the future. I believe that, you know, we're going to see this game do really well over the course of time. I think we'll expand the mobile and we'll expand to other new and interesting ways to play. But certainly this is just a moment where we take a pause and do all that we can for the core game and the core community.

Got it. And then just in light of the announcement that you guys are working on those three new Star Wars games, can you talk a little bit more about your vision for that IP? And is it fair to say that going forward you're planning to lean more towards investing in your own IP? And if so, what are some of the potential pros and cons of that as a strategy? Thanks.

Yeah, the very strength of our business is our balanced portfolio. We have both a deep and a broad portfolio. And what we've demonstrated over the course of our, you know, the best part of four years is to really develop both our own IP of a time that needs speed, the Sims, Battlefield, Apex Legends, our BioWare franchises. We have Skate in development now, Dead Space on the way. So an incredible portfolio of owned IP that has an extraordinary following across the industry. Combined with other long-term enduring IP, we have the power of our sports franchises. And they are true evergreen franchises. And this is not just about licensing content. This is about working with over 300 partners across the various sports industries to deliver a true connection with the sports, the leagues, the teams, the players that our fans love. And we've been doing that now for well over 30 years. And I think that we'll continue to do that for many, many years in the future. And things like the Star Wars franchise, again, a long-term relationship we've had with Disney for more than a decade. And this is not simply about building or revisiting things that already exist in the universe, but really adding to that Star Wars universe and really delivering new opportunities for Star Wars fans to experience great Star Wars content. And so as you think about our strategy going forward and the strength of our company, It really comes down to our ability to develop and build and publish, you know, industry-leading owned IP, but also work with partners over decades to truly deliver fan favorites with long and enduring fan bases like our sports franchises and like Disney.

Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Urichitz from Jefferies. Your line is now open.

Hey, thanks for taking the call and just reiterate the positive sentiment from Blake. I think it's been a great run. Really enjoyed it. I guess I just had really one question, no follow-up. One of your bigger competitors was just taken out. You guys have quite the portfolio and have taken a portfolio approach for years. How do you think the industry will look in three or four years? Do you guys see yourself as a consolidator, a potential seller? How do you see this industry shaking out over the next three to five years? Thanks.

Yeah, great question. And, you know, you should imagine we've been thinking about this for some time, as it turns out. And part of the reason why we have built the strength in our broad and deep portfolio and why we have gone out in search of the best teams in the industry to bring them into our company and build great entertainment for a global player base of what is now well over half a billion fans is because we do believe in the power of entertainment. We do believe in the power of interactive entertainment. I think what we're seeing now in the marketplace is the motion of the value of what we do in particular. And so as I think about the few entertainment coming together, you're seeing some other companies talk about this, But when we think about our players and we think about the things that they engage in, they play our games more than any other form of entertainment, but they also consume, you know, linear media and scripted entertainment and sports broadcast and music and other things. And so, you know, as we look at the future, we are building strength in our core ability to deliver interactive entertainment to our fans, which we think will continue to grow well north of a billion fans over time. But we're also aware that our fans are expecting us to find new and interesting ways for them to experience entertainment.

And so as we think about the future, you should think about it with IP at the center and watch, create an exclusive social ecosystem that brings content they love.

And when you look at our strategy of what we're doing around creating great entertainment, around building tools so that our community can engage more deeply, around the aggregation and distribution of content across platforms, across business models, across geographies, and really leaning into the social ecosystem that are born out of engagement in our games, I think you should imagine that's what the world looks a lot more like four or five years from now. Got it. Thanks so much.

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Hickey from Benchmark. Your line is now open.

Hey, Andrew, Blake, Chris. Thanks for taking my questions, guys. Blake, I'm going to miss you, but I'm sure you'll be getting a lot of skiing in, so I'm not feeling sorry for you. But it's been great working with you. Question is, I guess on Battlefield, obviously, it's disappointed. Can you give us, can you size the units you sold in quarter? I think you guided for 12 or so, but just sort of curious where you ended up versus expectations. And then thinking about how you sort of re-engage that audience, there's been some ideas around free-to-play, curious about the possibility. And then I didn't hear mobile. Did you drop mobile for Battlefield, or was that just delayed? Thanks for asking.

So, Mike, thanks for your nice comment to the other analysts as well. Unfortunately, I'm sure I won't get as much skiing as I would like. But, you know, we're going to refrain from trying to give updates. Remember, Battlefield is less than 10% of our revenue, so I'm not sure what you would do with that.

Clearly, we sold less units than we thought we would.

But what I would say is that, remember, these games are long tails. And we need new excitement to stretch this out. And in some ways, we hope it benefits FY23, since we've had a pretty strong FY22. And so it helps us in the future. I'll let Andrew address that.

You remember coming into the launch, the demand metrics were very high.

The core underlying created for the game still has really strong demand around it.

As I mentioned, we had some challenges around stability, particularly on high-end PC machines and performance, and there were some Some design decisions that, you know, not all the community really agreed with.

And so our focus right now is to really go back in and make sure we get that stuff right. And as much as I hate to admit it, you know, Dice is a studio that has been able to do this a number of times now and really go back in, rebuild at the core, and re-engage the community As long as we do that in conjunction with the community, that's what that studio is so great at doing. So I think the combination of Dice with the new leadership and a strong vision for the future, we will build out the core, we will re-engage the community, and we will manifest that demand that we saw coming into launch over the course of time. Mobile is still developing. The metrics are showing up really strong. I think right now we're looking to go into the next closed beta at the end of this month.

And as the case of mobile, you know, we'll continue to tune and test in the environment.

And then as it relates to free-to-play and other modalities of play, again, we have a big, bold vision for this franchise. This franchise, since its inception, has been a leader in creativity and innovation, both of how it's played and how it's delivered. And you should expect that we will continue to work to deliver new and interesting ways to engage with this game over the course of time. And while I'm disappointed with how it launched, I'm still very excited for the future.

Your next question comes from the line of Eric Handler from MKM Partners. Your line is now open.

Good afternoon, and thanks for the question. Andrew, I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about when you think about the expansion that's going on in the video games industry in the last year on that start to proliferate. We've seen a lot of venture capital funding into blockchain NFTs.

...FT gaming.

Wondering how you're thinking about, you know, those channels eventually, and is it easier to build from within? Is it better to buy once there's some established players there? You know, just want to get your mind set there.

Yeah, great question. I would tell you, I started this industry over 20 years ago. At that point in time, it was the fastest growing entertainment industry on the planet by a wide margin. I think it has been the fastest growing entertainment industry on the planet every year since then. But still, people seem to be surprised by this. So we're not surprised by it at all. And I think as technology has continued to evolve, we have been able to deliver new and interesting and fun ways to engage with content. And what we've seen more recently is just how powerful the social ecosystems, the social networks bought out of engagement in our games truly are. And it's not now just about ingesting entertainment the same way you do traditional scripted media or traditional broadcast or traditional music. This is about experiencing entertainment with your friends. And that's unbelievably powerful. I think that has been really the fuel that has driven the growth in recent times. As part of that, of course, the ability to create your own content and put it into that ecosystem has become a really valuable part of what our industry offers to our players and our fans. The traditional media just doesn't. And this is something that we hold true. Again, it's been at the very center of the Simmons for a long time. It's at the very center of modes like FIFA Ultimate Team and Madden Ultimate Team. It's at the very center of the design of Skate, which will be launching soon. And so this concept of UGC, or user-generated content, It's really just an extension of the social interaction that I'm able to have with my friends in and around experiencing what is the best entertainment on the planet. And so I believe that's going to be a really important part of our future. Now, to the extent whether we want to, you know, build that out or buy that over time, right now we are building. We're building technology. We're building creative. We're building assets. And we're offering that out to communities around the world, and we're seeing great uptake of that. You know, if there was an acquisition opportunity in the future, we would openly look at that, but we're not looking at anything at this juncture. Around the NFT and where VCs are investing, again, we see this also happen in our industry. We saw it with 3D. We saw it with AR, VR. We're now seeing it with NFTs. There's always something in the key metrics. It's around high-quality content. It's around scarcity. And it's around a group of people that find value in that content. And we've seen that happen in the real world, and we've seen

that happen in and around our game. And I believe that collectability will continue to be an important part of, you know, our industry and the games and experiences that we offer our players. Whether that's as part of NFT and the blockchain, we're going to deliver the best possible player experience we can. And so we're going to, we'll evaluate that over time, but right now it's not so. Thank you very much.

question comes from the line of Matthew Thornton from Tourist Security.

Hey, good afternoon, Andrew and Blake. Absolute best of luck to you in your future endeavors. I guess two questions.

First for me, you guys talked about in the back half of the that's partially offset by strength and in FIFA, Apex, and others. With FIFA in particular, I guess, you talked a lot about kind of unit strength year on year.

I'm just kind of curious how you felt about or are feeling about your ultimate team and the live services component into the back half of the year. I guess it's the first question.

Second question, curious, coming back to mobile and maybe some of the recent acquisitions, kind of curious if you could talk a little bit about how you're thinking about advertising. I know it's come up a bit. Other companies might get advertising. Glue brings some new capabilities to you.

So I'm curious how you're thinking about advertising. I'm curious how you're thinking about advertising.

the glue pipeline, you know, almost a year into that deal. And then also when we might start to hear a little more about kind of what your plans are with Metalhead and Super Mega Baseball. Thanks, guys.

So let me all start on the live service piece, and then I'll let Andrew hit the second question. You know, live service growth in the quarter was 9%. And trailing 12 months is 21%, and that's across all of our live services. And so if you look at something like Apex or FIFA, they're clearly well north of that. And we continue to feel it is one of the cores of our business because it is reoccurring and highly dependent on the social networks that we've created in our games, and particularly on sports. those are evergreen networks that continue every year. And so the metrics we see are exceptional, up well over last year. You know, you look at the Apex numbers as we reported, a dramatic improvement year over year. And everything they do is continuing to try to drive engagement with people. They've brought in a large number of new players into the game, retained players, and continue to come up with amazing and unique ideas for ways to play. So we're very excited about how that continues, and it continues across all of our sports, and we're looking as to how do we do that across more and more games going forward. So I'll let Andrew talk about glue a little bit.

Yeah, again, we are working closely with Glue. It's still relatively early days with the acquisition for both them and Playdemic. And we're working both on bolstering our existing 15 live services and building out new ones. And as per my prepared remarks, we're projecting well into double-digit growth next year. And that includes Apex Mobile and a renewed FIFA Mobile and a full year of and, you know, ongoing growth across the portfolio. And we're excited about that. With respect to advertising specifically, we are taking the glue advertising stack and applying it across our games. And it's a little early to know just yet exactly how that will manifest, but based on what we're seeing across the industry, we expect that that represents some revenue growth there also. So overall, you know, mobile now really is a strength of ours. It's a very important part of how we drive growth in the business, both in our existing games, in our new launches, and with the potential of mobile advertising across the portfolio.

Your next question comes from the line of Ducon from Stiefel. Your line is now open.

Okay, thanks. Hey, guys, good afternoon, and, boy, best of luck. Curious as to your thoughts on where the business is in terms of engagement normalizing. Is the reopening headwind behind you or is this something we should anticipate in calendar 22? Is it contemplated in your fiscal 23 net bookings forecast? And then separately, your OpEx growth year-to-date is approaching 30% year-on-year. Should we see that slow materially once you start the anniversary acquisitions, or how should we be thinking about OpEx going forward? Thanks.

Yeah, I can take the OpEx question quickly, Drew. I mean, clearly most of that was driven by two things. One is our acquisitions probably the biggest driver of it but second is driven by the fact that we've used this opportunity of some uh you know uh questions in uh the gamer community about which companies are going to be around and which aren't and we've been able to hire some amazing talent during that because of our stability And so that doesn't continue on forever. Obviously, the acquisition growth is a one-time component. So I think we're – remember, our OPEX really comes down to two things, headcount and marketing expense. So the marketing expense will swing by the titles that are in any one year. but we're pretty good at managing that. And the hit count, we're also very good at managing. And so I don't think you're going to see a jump like we've seen this past year. But remember, even with the OPEX growth that you see, look at the Q3 EPS number. I mean, clearly we've been able to manage that even with the downdraft of, you know, $48 million in revenue that flexible organization to be able to try to manage that to keep margins going. And so I think you'll see that going forward.

On engagement, through or post-COVID, depending on how you think about it, I think we've been on a rolling situation around the world of kind of coming back and shutting down a little and coming back. Broadly speaking, though, much of the world is out and about. They're at sporting events, they're going to theme parks, they're watching movies, they're going to dinner. So much of the world has returned mostly to normal at this juncture by our calculation. Even as part of that, we've seen not only number of players grow, again, over 540 million people now in our network, but we've also seen time spent in our games grow by over 20%. And I kind of look to that as not just about creating amazing games and entertainment, but it is the social interaction. I think what COVID has taught us is that games are a great way not just to get our entertainment fixed, but to remain deeply connected with our friends and fans and rivals. And what we're seeing now, I believe, is actually the long-term effect of the discovery of not just the value of what we do in terms of entertainment, but also the value in maintaining connections with those we care most about. And we would expect that to continue and actually create a flywheel for added growth.

Their next question comes from the line of Jason Bazinet from Citi. Your line is now open.

Thanks. I think it's a little bit early to talk about this, but I would be very curious about how you're thinking about your business and strategy as it relates to the metaverse as that becomes more real. Is that something that you view as just another opportunity for you to engage your fans? Is it a battle about time spent? Is it potentially sort of change industry sort of web shares, or is it just sort of a non-event, and you guys think you can sort of continue to focus on your IP and engagement, and it's really sort of not material. Thanks.

Yeah, I mean, a great question, and certainly another one of these things that is kind of a topic du jour at the moment, and many people are talking about it in different contexts, quite frankly. At the end of the day, the metaverse is a three-dimensional social space where you come together to experience things with your friends, And so now much of that happens in the two-dimensional internet around the social networks that we see. But I will tell you, a lot of that happens in the context of our games. And as I look at the nature of our games and I look at the engagement that we're seeing inside these 3D spaces that we create in and around sports and other worlds, what you see with our industry is the beginnings of what a metaverse might be. And over the course of time, you should expect us to continue to expand and extend the world that we have been creating for the last 30 years and deliver more experiences beyond the core conceit of the game. So what could you do in FIFA beyond playing football? What will you do in Need for Speed beyond driving a game? What will you do in The Sims as you come together with your friends beyond the creation of content? And you'll see that continue to evolve for us over the course of time. And I don't know ultimately what the metaverse will become, but what I do know is that the games we create are becoming more important as social spaces than they are just as places to enjoy great entertainment. As we continue to build out those experiences, as whatever the metaverse becomes, it's an almost certainty that we will play a very important role in it and that our players will be on the leading edge of the evolution of what these spaces might become. That's super helpful. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Mike, you know. from Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.

Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for the question. I just have two. First, I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about EA Play. You know, where are we with EA Play subscribers today, and how do you see the outlook for video game subscription services changing, particularly with recent consolidation? And then second, it was encouraging to hear the reiteration of the mid- to high-single-digit top-line growth for next year. I was wondering if you could go a little bit more in detail around some of the drivers. You know, what do you see driving some of the FIFA strength, and are there new games or unannounced titles embedded in that outlook? Thank you very much.

Yeah, let me quickly hit on the EA Play component, and then I'll let Blake talk about the media hosting, which it grows. EA Play continues to grow for us. It continues to be a really, really positive consumer experience, getting access to some of the greatest content in the industry. What we see more broadly across entertainment is that subscription continues to be a core driver and that what we're able to do is drive ongoing engagement, perhaps in a way even that's stronger than traditional linear or scripted entertainment. I think that we will continue to see consumers engage in our content through subscription, and we'll continue to provide our content that way. And I think we'll start to see more and more growth across platform. We continue to be the leading provider of a gaming subscription across platforms in our industry. And with the depth and breadth of our portfolio and the new experiences we have coming, we believe that we're going to continue to drive growth there. And over the course of time, back to my earlier point around entertainment, you might expect us to do more things beyond just games in the context of that subscription around a broader service for our players. And we're pretty excited about what that might become over the course of time.

And, you know, on the 23 question, obviously, as we said, we're not yet ready to give guidance, which we normally don't do at this time of the year, but we did give some hints and You know, the keys to driving growth are obviously our core portfolio, things like FIFA, for example, and live services associated with it, Madden, hockey, other sports. Apex Legends obviously has continued to evolve and shown amazing growth. We will have an Apex Legends mobile game in the market. We don't know exactly what time that will be, and there will be a global build for that game as well as a Chinese build for that game. And we're working with a partner there, and things are going very well in test, but we're excited about that as a major growth driver. We will have more growth, we think, out of the FIFA mobile game that we just put into the market. And remember that we only had or have booked really a half a year of Playdemic's golf clash game. We'll have a full year of that next year. And we're working with Playdemic on how they can take that clash mechanic into other sports areas where we have licenses already. And then we've got a Need for Speed game coming, and there are three or four more things that we haven't announced yet, but you can imagine we are always trying to find ways to grow the portfolio year over year through new titles, new IP, and expansion, and as well acquisitions, which right now we're in the digest mode, but it doesn't mean that we – We'll keep looking at everything going forward. So we're excited about next year. It looks like a strong year to come. And as Andrew said, we know that this is one of the greatest entertainment vehicles in the world right now, and so we're really in the sweet spot, and that's what gets us excited about it.

Great. Thank you both. That was incredibly helpful. And, Blake, best of luck in your next chapter. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Mario Lou from Barclays. Your line is now open.

Great. Thanks for taking the questions. And, Blake, it's been a pleasure interacting with you over the years.

I appreciate that.

Yeah, I guess the first question is more high level. You guys said in your slides, you know, spending playing time is a increased 20% compared to the year prior. What was the largest driver of that? And I don't know if you have this data, but what's the typical lag historically between growth and time spent and monetization? And then secondly, you guys didn't really talk about Madden as much on this call. So just wondering what the delta is between his performance versus like a FIFA. Are things like people kind of driving the group here. Anything out of Madden that you can talk about? Thanks.

So let me start with Madden. Madden is also having a great year and we're seeing For all of you who follow the season, this has been an unbelievably exciting season of football. It was exciting for a second. The playoff games and the season overall has been an unbelievably exciting game. The ratings for the NFL have been incredible. you know, extremely strong through the year. And that's driving really strong engagement in and around our Madden franchise. And it continues to go from strength to strength. With respect to what drove engagement, you know, again, we have this great portfolio. And while we certainly saw extraordinary growth in Apex Legends, we saw great growth in FIFA, we also saw growth across the portfolio. And on, you know, Apex was 30%, you know, FIFA was, our ESports portfolio was up 10% on what is a very big number. But, you know, we've seen growth across the portfolio, and that speaks to the value of the breadth and the depth of our portfolio. In terms of lag between engagement and monetisation growth, which I think was one part of your question there, I don't have exact numbers for you on that. What I would tell you is our teams work very closely with the communities and ensure that they're always providing new and interesting content. And what we know about all of our communities they play is they make a choice of, do they want to invest more time or do they want to invest more money in the experience? And it's really the ability to build that balanced ecosystem that speaks to the strength of our live services over time. And so it's a very symbiotic relationship that happens between the investment of time and the investment of money over the course of the experience. And our teams have become very, very good at that and work very, very closely with their communities to drive it.

Yeah, and one thing I just remind everybody, and we may have already said this, but I'll say it again. You know, we shipped last year FIFA in the third quarter due to the pandemic. We delayed it three weeks and moved it into the third quarter. We shipped it this year in the second quarter. So when you look at the growth of the third quarter, knowing that that didn't include the initial ship-in of FIFA, it's almost hard to believe the strength of the business. And so I just want people not to forget that. We're not going to provide numbers or details around that exactly, but just know that to see the growth that we saw after having moved it back to the second quarter, it's pretty impressive.

very helpful.

Thank you. Their next question comes from the line of Andrew Merrick from Raymond James. Your line is now open.

Thanks for taking my questions and wanted to pass my best wishes on to Blake as well. Um, I'm apex legend. So season 12 seems like a more substantial content dropped in the typical season. So whether it's amounts of content or type of content, is there anything that particularly stands out as a driver for new player acquisition and engagement, whether it's game modes, new maps, or things like that? And then second on FIFA, around the growth in unit sales year over year, I guess at this point, who was interested in FIFA 22 that maybe wasn't in FIFA 21? Were there any particular markets or customer segments that saw solid unit growth? Thank you.

Wow, some detailed questions. And they're great questions, so thank you. On Apex, again, as the teams put together these seasons of content and they think about new content and new modalities of play and new ways to connect, remember, Apex is now well over 100 million players. And so there's no one-size-fits-all component that really attracts new players or engages any broad group of players deeply. I think what the Respawn team and the APEX team in particular have been able to demonstrate is they work very close with their community. They're deeply engaged with their community. And they're delivering content, modalities of play, maps, these things. that really speak to what the community are asking for and need. And what we've seen since the very beginning of the launch of this game is them being able to work in a very calculated way around the delivery of really interesting new content, new maps, and new models of play on a season-by-season basis that has continued to grow the overall player base, continue to grow the overall experience, continue to grow the engagement that player base has with the experience, and the investment those players are making as part of their engagement. And so we're very excited about that. And then with respect to FIFA, you know, again, this is another team that has demonstrated the power of working very closely with the community in and around, you know, a live service. Football or soccer as we call it in this country continues to grow. The leagues, the teams, the players are going from strength to strength in popularity. We have over 300 licenses in the game and 300 partners that we work with in the provision of what is a growing, broadening, deepening experience for our player base. The world of football grows as we build our fan base. Again, if you think about the fan base we have for our product or our service, it's the largest digital football club in the world with well over 100 million fans. And we work very close with that fan base around their ability to experience football in a way that's most meaningful to them. around their leagues, around their teams, around the players they love. And the reason we're able to continue to drive growth in and around that franchise is because we do work very closely with our global community of fans, and we are delivering them, again, content, gameplay, modalities of play that is most interesting and most exciting to them and connects them most deeply with the sport they love and the fans they love it with.

Thank you. Okay, your next question comes from the line of Doug Gritz from Calvin. Your line is now open.

Hey, thank you. Paramount Plus dropped a pretty expensive-looking Halo trailer over the weekend, and Netflix has had some success with The Witcher and League of Legends on their streaming service. There's absolutely ravenous demand for content right now from half of those are social streaming services. And you guys have some IP, particularly within BioWare, that I think would be pretty good as a basis for a show. Are we finally at a point where video game IP has some meaningful transmedia opportunities, or do you think that's still more a theory than a reality?

No, I think what you just said and what we've experienced, you know, video game IP or interactive entertainment IP is now some of the most culturally relevant IP in all of entertainment. And I think that's going to continue to grow when you think about hundreds of millions of fans engaging in and around the IP we create, like Apex, like The Sims, like Need for Speed, like our Bioware franchises, like Dead Space, like Skate. It's not unnatural for that to spawn kind of a scripted entertainment IP element. I think traditionally the scripted entertainment elements in our industry have not been big revenue drivers in and of themselves, but where they have been of high quality, they have lifted the overall engagement in the franchise more deeply. So there's kind of a one-two punch that drives growth in the business. I think as we think about our future, We do believe that this thing that we do that is interactive entertainment is becoming more and more important on a daily basis to all fans, and that our fans are going to want to experience that in many different modalities, and some of that might be scripted entertainment in nature. And you should expect that we're looking at any and all aspects that allow us to extend and expand our brand's for our fan base, but that we're doing it very thoughtfully and, again, as part of our strategy, doing it profitably.

Great. Thanks, Andrew, and best wishes, Blake.

Thanks, Doug. Look, everyone, that's the last question. I appreciate everyone's very kind words, and I'll be around for a while and make sure that we get our new CFO fully on board, and as I said, he'll be much better than me. Everyone stay healthy, and we look forward to talking to you next quarter.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating.