Electronic Arts Believes Single-Player Games Are a “Really, Really Important Part” of its Portfolio

Today, during Electronic Arts’ quarterly financial conference call for analysts and investors, chief executive officer Andrew Wilson and chief financial officer Chris Suh talked about single-player games.

Wilson explained that single player-games are part of Electronic Arts’ strategy to fulfill the players’ expectations and motivations and actually help grow the publisher’s network and the time players spend within the network and playing EA’s games.

As such, they’re a “really, really important part” of Electronic Arts’ overall portfolio.

“The way we think about this is really less about which game, and more about which motivations that these games fulfill.

So we know that our players have these core motivations, inspiration, escape, social connection competition, self-improvement, and creation. These things that bring us together as players of games and the creation of worlds and the building of characters, and the telling of stories is really important in the fulfillment of some of those motivations.

So when we think about our portfolio and we think about building it out, we really think about it on two key vectors. One, how can we tell incredible stories, and two, how can we build tremendous online communities? And then how do we bring those two things together?

So the way you should, when you look at our portfolio, what you should be looking for is, how are we doing that? How are we building these worlds and telling their stories? How are we developing global online communities? And how we bring those two things together for the fulfillment of motivations.

And what we see, when we get that, is one, we grow our network, and two, we grow the amount of time that players spend in our network and in and around our games. And as we think about single-player games, we think it’s a really, really important part of the overall portfolio that we deliver in the fulfillment of those core motivations.

And the way we will plan for it all the time is really just looking at our community, and looking at how they’re spending their time, and looking at where motivations may or may not be fulfilled. And we’ll look to supplement that with the addition of new online games, new multiplayer games, and new single-player games.”

That being said, Suh added that Live Service games still take the lion’s share of the company’s business as they’re “a proven, very reliable, highly recurring revenue stream.”

“Andrew here explained it well, but as we think about the model impact in the financial impact of that, the first thing to always keep in mind is that Live Services still encompasses, on a trailing 12 month basis, over 70% of our business, and that has been a proven, very reliable, highly recurring revenue stream and that will still be the predominant driver in our PNL [Profit and Loss] long-term.

Second. We’ve talked a lot about the areas of investment that we’re making, and that’s both in the live service as well as some of the single [Player] title launches that you seen.

And so over the course of time, we’ll continue to invest… our long-term growth will continue to invest in the ongoing, stable performance of our Live Services business and there’ll be some puts and takes along the way.”

If you’d like to learn more about Electronic Arts’ financial performance during the past quarter, you can read our dedicated article with plenty of info.