Bringing EA's big sports brands to mobile gaming

[Music] thank you um so I am the executive producer for sports um I think we a little bit short on time so I'm going to run a little bit faster um but we touched on a couple of EA Games earlier so we kind of we'll have a a good balance but the fortunate thing is we're going to talk about sports today which I think is a better story for EA um a lot of what we think about when we think about video games is creating a world for our players to kind of immerse themselves in so they can deeply engage in that world and when we think about worlds there's few in my opinion that have the appeal of sport uh appeal in terms of appealing across the world appealing across gender demographic uh age etc etc Sports has a huge appeal uh and then when we think about it we think how big is that appeal how big is the market uh we may have that same delay potentially okay okay um we look into

sports a lot we're a sports business uh and we estimate based on the research we have that the Market's worth about $700 billion globally I also for what it's worth see other numbers reported elsewhere and to be honest today is a little bit less about the value of the sports market and more partly about the fact that it's big but more around the fact that we have a lot of fans of these sports that are deeply engaged in those Sports uh we know that the Super Bowl last year had over 150 million viewers in the us alone and that's just a North American football game uh we know that the London Olympics had 3.5 billion viewers and we know that the 2014 soccer World Cup had about 3.2 billion um so these are huge groups of people that are deeply engaged in the sports that they follow viewing the sports on a regular basis and are essentially consuming as much content and experiences around these Sports as they can so our vision as a group is actually to be become the biggest

brand for Sports on mobile so not just Sports gaming brand but sports brand on mobile we actually think we have a good shot at being able to do that for three key reasons one there's a huge growth potential for Sports on mobile if we think about HD or console the category of sports is worth about 15 to 20% uh and on mobile it's only about 3 to five so it's a huge opportunity if we build the right type of games we've also seen from our success with Madden Mobile over the last couple years which I'll dig into in a little bit more detail where we built a business and grown a business 10x in 2 years if we put the right game in the market we can actually realize some of that opportunity secondly just the sheer volume of players that we acquire and engage on a daily basis is massive it's over 100 million at the moment with the current sports games that we have and then finally and possibly most important to today it's the value of the brand and the brands that we have in the IPS that kind of roll up as part of that brand and that's really one of our key USPS or key differentiators that I believe will give

us the ability to kind of capture and engage that huge Global audience of people who love Sport and love any piece of content experience that has to do with that sport so if we think about brand we think about our brand EA Sports brand and all the franchises that roll up as part of that brand uh it's it's a huge brand it's synomous with sport it regular gets reported as one of the top 10 Global brands for sports has a huge reach of players uh and and an audience base um I believe we have over 150 million players of our sports games we have over 130 active users of our web network uh every month we have over 70 million followers of the various social channels and I can give you you know boring stat after boring stat but the point is it's a huge player base uh that's aligned with the brand of EA Sports when they think of that brand of EA Sports they think of four key things or all the research and all the conversations we've had with our players

is it kind of groups into four key things when they think about EA Sports they think about the competitive culture so we have the biggest online community of people and players that you can connect with and play competitively against they think about quality and Innovation our gaml is the highest quality and the most authentic to sport that really is the next kind of gen of uh interactive and immersive Sports experiences they think about how our products have now turned into these live Services where we provide different fresh new ways for our players to interact with our games on a constant basis we tie those new ways to the sports that they love as well as the real world Seasons that the sports kind of interact within and then finally it's all about Community we listen to our players before during and after each of our launches and we ensure that that kind of fan feedback not all of it's good some of it's bad some of it's constructive but we make sure that we listen to it and react to it so that that fan feedback is at the core of every experience that we build so that's

what we believe people think about when they think of the EA Sports brand and that's how we think about it internally but that's a lot to kind of take in it's a big brand it's a lot to take in and we ask ourselves how do we do how do we take all that input how do we take that brand how do we take that kind of consumer expectation around that brand and turn it into an experience that has all those things that make sense on a small screen and we're fortunate that we have a really good reference point for what that looks like now as a business if you're not familiar with Madam mobile which you may not be if you're based in Canada we get a lot of um puzzled look sometimes when we talk about NFL um it's had a great couple of years uh it's had what we believe is kind of a breakthrough two years it had um it's just had a nice long run of continued engagement um within a growing user base it was top one grossing in the US last year over Christmas has a peak da of over 3 and a half during the peak Seasons it's Peak Revenue days in the multiple of million

so it's had a really great run which is fantastic for the business of Mad Mobile and fantastic for the for the small team that are build the game but it's actually really good for us as a sports business because we can take those learnings and create like a framework or a recipe for Success uh that's really redefined how we think about what a sports mobile game needs to be in order to be successful uh so for the purpose of today I've tried to distill what is quite a complex framework that we've created uh and learn and all that kind of stuff into kind of three really simple high level buckets uh first one is about fitting into a mobile Gamer's life I won't speak about this a lot because I know everybody in the room understands it but it was a big shift to be candid for us as an organization it's about we know that mobile Gamers play differently they play shorter sessions longer sessions they play on buses they play in totally different contexts than what our Gamers previously or we thought our Gamers previously played in where we were used to an environment where a gamer would purchase a product a pack good product

spent a bunch of money doing that a bunch of money on the hardware and then they'd sit down for a couple of hours every evening or longer over the weekends and really get into gaming this is totally different uh and for the longest time we tried to make that old approach work we tried to change uh and convince ourselves that mobile Gamers expected that high quality High Fidelity that was our USP that was our strength and it really wasn't um what we really needed to do was turn our games into an experience that actually fitted into the life of a mobile gamer instead of the other way around live services like anything for EA Sports authenticity is absolutely key and it's that live service is that direct connection to the Real World of Sports so if I'm playing a soccer game on my mobile how do I weave content and the experience into the actual world of soccer that's where we bring authenticity that we just can't be matched by anybody else in the market and we know our players want this and then finally it's about social it's about encouraging competition and connection amongst our player bases

so if we talk really quickly about each one of those Innovative gameplay to fit into Mobile Gamers life this is one of the biggest changes uh and and true areas of innovation in the Madden mobile game where we took an old approach where we used to have an approach of we basically took a console game that was high quality great engagement amongst the player base on Console awardwinning all that kind of great stuff and try to put it directly on a mobile phone and it didn't really work because the games were all over a gig uh you required about 10 at least minutes if not longer to play a game and the controls were super difficult um it was just a hard experience for a mobile phone not rocket science but that's what we tried to do for a bunch of time uh it just didn't work what we did with this game uh our objective was actually to create a gameplay experience a meaningful gameplay experience that could be completed in 30 seconds and also give the player reward so a complete feedback loop of gameplay and reward within 30 seconds and that's I think where again the true area of innovation or just

change for us with this game is we're able to do that we're able to take the high quality gameplay out of Madden HD um which is you know super high fidelity um crazy complex uh complexity around animation etc etc and turn that into short bite-sized gameplay Loops that could be completed in 30 seconds we knew when we started prototyping this a couple of years ago we knew it would be fun you know as soon soon as you kind of cut it down into short experiences that you can play in 30 seconds while you're waiting for a cup of coffee or whatever it is knew people would like it to be honest we didn't know people would like it as much as they do like it over 99 actually I was told this this morning 99.7% of our players play Live Events so it's had obviously is popular it's had far more adoption than any other mode in any other sports game that we put on mobile and we know that over 30 billion Live Events were completed in Madden Mobile in the last year alone so that much of consumption that much of Engagement in a product that's just North American focused and while it has a big audience isn't that huge compared to some other mobile games is just a

huge support of the fact that people love this way of playing sports games on a mobile phone so we'll quickly have a look at what that looks like if you haven't played Madden log into the game you have all these Live Events a carousel of Live Events you click on a live event Live Events can be really a whole range of different types of things skill-based drills training drills completing part of a game this is a running drill or you have to do is pick your play pick your run that you want to play and then your J your job is to score some touchdowns here it's about running through zones completing a pass also score a touchdown some other scenarios like this one are just about you know avoiding obstacles uh and getting down to the end zone really simple really accessible again and then from here when you complete it you get your reward and the beauty about this is it's an immediate positive feedback and what it does is contribute toward the meta or the kind of longer term goals of the game which is around building my team building my squad and ideally creating the ultimate Madden NFL team so really easy to play the beauty of it it

changes every day every single day we have at least three if not five six plus live events that get added to the map they're linked to bigger and broader campaigns a variety of the gam play is different every day um so not only is it easy to play quick to dip in and dip out but it's different every single day secondly it's that live service that we spoke about in terms of authenticity with sport uh for us live service is about giving our players a reason to come back each and every day now that's obviously the job of anyone that builds a mobile game is you want to increase the engagement and ideally the retention of that game we're quite lucky because we have that narrative sport that we can just purely lean into it's it's almost an unfair advantage against other sports against other mobile games to be honest uh for us again it's giving those re those players a reason to kind of constantly come back we add new content to the map each and every day and then every month we create what we call bigger campaigns and those campaigns are where we connect all the different game modes in the game with all the content that's in the game and being added to the game and we give it a a creative

theme or a rapper that pulls all that together now those creative themes or rappers can be linked directly to the sport so for Madden it might be uh a a campaign around the Super Bowl for example or maybe draft um but also what we've done this year is which is a little bit different and a little bit inauthentic is we start we've started to connect those campaigns to things that are happening in the real world that aren't Madden or NFL specific so we have a Halloween theme we have a Thanksgiving theme we have a Christmas theme that a couple of years ago anyone that worked for Madden would have been incredibly unhappy with the very suggestion that we would have a Thanksgiving theme within the game where you could earn drumsticks and mashed potato and all that kind of crazy stuff because it's not that authentic but what we found over time is that our players just love it they love any new reason to engage in the game any new content anything that's collectible that allows them to continue to build their longer term goals within the game so if we look at how that manifests itself this is a semi- recent one for the draft you come into the game the

arts different the messaging is different you know that something is different about the game you know it's draft time it points you to game experiences content impacts a variety of different things you come back into the Live Events this time there's a draft themed live event where you can play again one of those skill-based drills you can actually use the players that are in the draft uh line up for that evening you can play this for a number of days before the draft again you complete these relatively simple pieces of gameplay and you earn the rewards this time the rewards are kind of themed in that kind of idea of the draft you uh we create a number of kind of Collectibles and rewards that go towards a the broader uh mode that we call sets which is our kind of collection mechanic within Madden uh the idea is you earn rewards that are draft theme the actual nice bit of this is it's the most direct link to the draft of any other interactive experience because the content that we're putting in packs live all the way through the evening we had a team at the draft was as soon as that player got drafted onto their new team for the following year that player was

available in a pack as a reward on their new team within minutes of being drafted so if you following the draft if you're a hardcore or even a you know remotely engaged NFL fan you could play Madam Mobile minutes after a draft have been completed with a player that just moved on to their new team in their new kit so truly like that's just the most fun and engaging but also authentic experience uh and far earlier than you would see it in console or other kind of mediums um so really great level of Engagement around these kind of key beats for us and then finally social features we know social is important uh David mentioned you know guilds and clans earlier which is a big thing to drive you deeper engagement uh for us social features allow our players to connect and play cooperatively uh in what we call leagues which is effectively guilds um they also can compete against each other in head-to-head modes and they can also use social media to kind of celebrate their successes uh and rewards from within the game um we we know that players that interact with their social features

engage in the game deeper and they stay longer which is pretty indicative of most games but we also know that Madam mobile um and the players of Madam mobile interacted with our social features about 600% more in the last two years than they previously had done which has obviously been a big driver for the success that we've seen in the product so social is really big for us and it's kind of a big part of the kind of future plans around the product if you look really quickly uh this is kind of the League's mode again which is very much like guilds you can log into your guild or your league screen you see all the different leagues that you're currently competing against this is a live bracket about my league against another League I can see how we're going how each person has scored if I drill into my league screen I can chat with my teammates as well as the teammates of our opposing league so we can kind of talk some trash talk or whatever it might be um then I can also pick the players in the opposing League that I want to play against and then from there I go directly into game so I can pick who I want to play with immedi compete against them ideally I would win which

would give me rewards as a player but also give me give my league rewards so again that Cooperative aspect of a league or a guild our league would progress up the ladder and the longer term goal in Madden Mobile for anyone who's hard core who stays a long time in the game is to be part of a league to play in that league and for that League to go up the the lad board or the leader board of leagues and to hit the top 100 and it's all about being a top 100 League uh once you've been in the game Beyond about a month so this is really where we've driven a huge amount of deeper engagement and we know that people that spend time in this mode convert better spend better and then they just stay longer in the game so it's a super important part of the game for us so that's that's the lessons if you like at a super high level I know I've gone quite um high level for the time I have but I'm ha I'll happily answer any specific questions about any of that um for us it's great because we have a framework that we can use to continually develop the product going forward but it's even better because we have a sports business and that Sports business has more than one product and it's not just about Madden and now it's about

using that recipe and apply it to other sports even bigger sports that we have the brands and the IPS already attached to so the next one is NBA huge Global Sport 450 million fans worldwide versus 15 175 of the NFL so it's a huge opportunity and again it's an opportunity for us to take that framework take that that recipe for what makes for a good sports game and apply it to another brand and another franchise that we already have a relationship with we already have products in the space we already have a consumer base and a kind of community that we're already engaging so this is the next game it's actually built here in Canada soft launched in Canada worldwide launch next week this is a Quick Clip uses all the same core components of the meta around Madden around short gameplay Live Events connected to the world of NBA NBA is great because with the NFL there's only 20 something games a year NBA has 88 games a year so there's a lot more of that that sport

narrative for us to kind of lean into and really leverage the brand of the NBA so that's NBA live with Russell with a really weird expression on his face uh and that's it so we're bringing the biggest Sports and athletes and the biggest brands uh to mobile we have high aspirations for what we can do with that and we think we have a player base that we can engage in a really effective way going forward so that's it thank [Music] you