EA’s march to 1 billion gamers

ANDREW WILSON: The biggest, most important decisions are a strong balance of both fear and excitement. I think that’s true for humanity and AI right now.

A game like college football, where we put 150 stadiums and 11,000 star athletes into the game in what was a three-year development cycle — well, that just wouldn’t be possible without AI. It just wouldn’t be.

What if we give our global community of players access to all of the AI tools we use to build games, and let them create whatever they want?

AI supercharged our existing business, it supercharges our creators, and with the utilization of this technology, we can actually be leaders in creating new forms of interactive entertainment, and we’re equally excited about that.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Andrew Wilson, CEO of Electronic Arts — the California-based game developer behind franchises like EAFC, Battlefield, The Sims, and more. Andrew was in New York City for EA’s Investor Day, so we got to catch up in person, talking about EA’s rebrand of the hit soccer game formerly known as FIFA, how the company is utilizing AI, and why he believes a billion-user customer base is just around the corner. Plus, how Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu shapes Andrew’s leadership strategy and which games he most likes to play. This is Andrew’s second appearance on Rapid Response, and he doesn’t disappoint — bold, thoughtful, and above all, passionate. It’s a rich loot box, so let’s lock in and level up. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Andrew Wilson, the CEO of Electronic Arts. Andrew, thanks for joining us.

WILSON: Thanks for having me.

SAFIAN: You’ve been in New York for your investor day, right? Which I understand is probably a lot of fun, but also nerve-wracking. Like, you get to release and talk about new things that you’re excited about, but you have to watch every word that you say. Is preparing for these things like preparing for a presidential debate? You know, being peppered with questions by your team and trying to come up with the right zinger?

WILSON: Yes, I think. I mean, I don’t know exactly what goes into a presidential debate, but for us— words matter. And when we come and do one of these things, we’re speaking to our investor community but also speaking to our global gamer community.

We get to come, and not only do we get to talk about our company, and why we believe in our company, and why we believe we have the capacity to lead the future of entertainment, we get to show some incredible things that the world hasn’t seen yet. Our team showed a lot of really cool stuff.

Copy LinkInside EA’s goal to double their user base in five years

SAFIAN: You announced plans to double EA’s user base to more than a billion people in the next five years. That’s kind of an epic number. You must have to really expand the demo of your users beyond the sort of core demo of men 12 to 25. Or is it more about expanding globally? How do you get to those numbers?

WILSON: Well, I think there’s a few things happening. One is we start with a really big base. So we’ve got the best part of 700 million people in our network today who have been interacting with our games over the last 12 months. There’s probably a lot more than that if we total the people that have interacted with our games over the last 10 years. But certainly, as we look forward, it really comes down to a few things.

One, interactive is becoming the first form of entertainment. So as we look at younger generations, they’re choosing interactive entertainment as their first form of entertainment and their favorite form of entertainment, where they can play content, create content, watch content, but more specifically connect with their friends through that content.

And so, as we fast forward, we put our crystal ball on the table. We think there’s probably 10 or a dozen massive online communities in the world five years from now concentrated around the world’s biggest IP.

We’re super lucky. We’ve got five or six of the world’s biggest IPs — our American football franchise, our global football franchise in FC, Apex, Battlefield, The Sims. We hope Skate will be one of these things. And so, as you think about maybe half of the world’s massive online communities around big IPs, and you think about the world having three to three and a half billion players, creators, watchers, in these new generations around that IP, it’s not unnatural for us to have well over a billion. Hell, I’d like to be able to say three billion. We can’t actually ratify that number. But we’re pretty confident in well over a billion.

SAFIAN: But it doesn’t necessarily sound like you’re looking for or needing new audiences. You sort of feel like organically kind of growing out of the base you have is where at least the near-term future is?

WILSON: We know we have hundreds of millions of people that engage with us for 90 minutes a day on average in and around this incredible IP. But if you’re a sports fan and you’ve played FC or Madden or college football for 90 minutes a day, the thing you do right after that is you leave that and you go to another platform and you create content around that experience. Then you go to another platform, and you talk about that experience and share that content.

In doing so, you’re bringing all kinds of other people into your community, your little atomic unit that may not have even played the game. And so we believe that if we think about building massive online communities, telling blockbuster stories, and harnessing the power of community beyond the bounds of our games — we will, in fact, both engage our existing community at a greater level, but by the very nature of doing that will attract new audiences in new markets and new geographies.

We’re going to really lean into that in sports first, with the EA sports app, but we’ll do that across all of our great IPs like Battlefield, The Sims, Skate, and Apex.

Copy LinkThe vision behind the EA sports app

SAFIAN: Yes, I was gonna ask you about the EA sports app because it sounds like it’s a content hub, if I’m understanding it the right way, where communities will happen, but you’ll also be sort of sharing information about your games, a little bit like what people do on Twitch and YouTube now. Or am I not quite understanding that?

WILSON: I think it’s a little different.

In our network right now, we have over 250 million sports fans engaging deeply in sports through our games. When we look at these newer generations, many of them choose to connect with their friends through our games before they do it through the traditional purveyors of sport or the broader social networks. And so we look at that and say, “Okay, how do we fulfill their needs and motivations when they’re not playing?”

And that’s really the birth or the reason for the EA Sports app. How do we take your virtual sports fandom and align that with your sports fandom of the things that are going on in the real world of sports? How do we slam those together? How do we better fulfill the needs of these growing sports communities who are watching more content through highlights and want to create their own sports fan content and share that with their friends?

SAFIAN: But the creation of that content, I mean now, or traditionally, that’s been happening on other platforms. Are you expecting that to happen on your platform?

WILSON: I don’t think it will stop happening on other platforms. I think there’ll be less friction for it to happen on our platform.

SAFIAN: So it can appear in both places. Like you’re, you’re not necessarily trying to become Twitch?

WILSON: No, we’re trying to serve sports fans. So if you take FC, for instance, inside of that giant community, these little atomic units of four or five people, this is the best friends. This is the people you watch football with on your couch on a Sunday afternoon.

And so, when we think about that group, they’ve spent 90 minutes together. They then have to separate and go to another platform and reconnect and chat. And then they separate and go to another platform, and they reconnect and create content, and they separate, and they go back to another platform, and they reconnect and share that content. What if they could just do all of that together? And oh, by the way, in addition to that, could get all their sports news, all their sports information, deeper connection with the athletes and teams and leagues they love, and a level of interactivity added to their real-world sports fandom that today only exists inside the context of their video games.

Copy LinkEvolving from FIFA to FC

SAFIAN: So you mentioned FC a couple of times. If we’d had this conversation not that long ago, we would have been saying FIFA instead of FC. So this is a rebranding, a high-wire act in some ways, because it is a super successful and big franchise for you. What’s different between FC and the old FIFA? How did you think about making that transition? What did you have to do? Or is it really like, just change the name and everything’s fine?

WILSON: I wish it was just change the name and everything is fine. A great deal of thought went into that, and we had an incredible relationship with FIFA for 30 years. We did a lot of amazing things together, but what became apparent to us was we want to do a whole bunch of new things. We wanted to build new relationships with other commercial partners. We wanted to do more beyond the bounds of our game, like this concept, like an EA Sports app. And what became apparent to us was the only way to do that was to actually have a brand that we owned, that the collective of our 300 partners owned and that our hundreds of millions of fans owned.

SAFIAN: You just have more freedom to act with.

WILSON: A great deal more freedom and the ability to move a lot faster. I think what you saw last year, our partners showed up, and our fans rallied around, and we had record levels of engagement, and the business continued to grow. What we’ve announced we’re doing in the game in years to come with social spaces and new modalities of play, I do believe that this can be the single strain of DNA that ties football fans and more broadly sports fans together on a global basis.

SAFIAN: And so it wasn’t that FIFA didn’t want to do this with you. It was just it would be faster and easier for you to do it on your own.

WILSON: Anytime you manage 300 partners, hundreds of millions of players, and our own desires to be innovative and creative, there’s always some conversation that happens. I think what we now feel like is that we are more free to have those conversations and do these things.

I would say we still have a tremendous relationship with FIFA. They have an incredible product in the World Cup. They have an incredible product in the Women’s World Cup. In the meantime, we’re doing incredible things with our 300 other partners, our 100 million players, and our game teams, their imaginations are big, and their capacity to live against those imaginations is real.

SAFIAN: It’s a difficult transition in a lot of different ways. It seems like it’s gone very smoothly, but are there lessons from it that you have taken away?

WILSON: I think what’s become apparent to me over the years, and certainly to our company, is that the biggest, most important decisions are a strong balance of both fear and excitement. And I think if you have equal parts fear and excitement as you’re making a decision, it’s a really important one, and you should take the opportunity to be very bold in the making of that decision.

And we don’t always get it right. We are humans. As humans, we are imperfect creatures. As companies, we’re collections of humans. But on balance, I think we’ve done an incredible job of making some really bold decisions, and our business has been rewarded as a result.

SAFIAN: When Andrew talks about the business being rewarded, he’s not kidding. EA’s user base spiked during the pandemic, and unlike some other COVID darlings like Peloton, it has continued to grow. Still, no company can afford to rest these days, whether that’s new products, new branding, or new technology, particularly AI. We’ll dig into that after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break, we heard EA CEO Andrew Wilson explain why growing to one billion users might be a conservative goal. Now we talk about the impact of AI on gaming, whatever happened to the metaverse, and the lessons he takes from Steven Spielberg, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkHarnessing AI for game development

SAFIAN: How are you navigating and using AI in game development, in gameplay? Obviously, you say your collection of people, but you’re also a collection of technology.

WILSON: If I go back to situations that are equal parts fear and equal parts excitement, I think that’s true for humanity and AI right now. And so that means this is a really important one for us to think through. We think about it on three vectors.

We think about it in the context of efficiency. It’s not just about cost savings, but it’s about how do we do more for our players? How do we have more iterations, better testing, and greater culturalization to deliver the things that we deliver for our players faster? Game development now, like when we’re building a new game, it’ll take five, six, seven years, and some of our competitors take even longer.

The reality is, when you’re moving at the speed of sport or moving at the speed of pop culture, it moves way faster than every decade. So we do think AI is going to allow us to get to the fun more quickly for our players.

SAFIAN: So, newer games, newer features, all of that to be able to happen more rapidly.

WILSON: I think there is: “how do we do what we do today more rapidly?” Then the second part is expansion, which is new games, new features, new modalities of play, letting our creators paint on a bigger canvas with a more spectacular array of colors. So they might paint more spectacular worlds.

A game like college football, where we put 150 stadiums and 11,000 star athletes into the game in what was a three-year development cycle — well, that just wouldn’t be possible without AI. It just wouldn’t be. In all of our other games, we can maybe get 500 new heads built a year.

This is the first college game to ever have real athletes in it. We needed to be able to replicate them in a photo-realistic way in the context of our game.

Otherwise, we couldn’t deliver on the promise of what college football could be. We would not have done that without AI.

Copy LinkCreating new forms of interactive entertainment

On a longer timeline, we think about transformation. We think about how we can use AI to create new categories of entertainment. The best example for us is if we go back to the early 2000s when YouTube was doing cat videos, two things were true. Again, fear and excitement. The fear was, “Oh my goodness, is this going to disrupt Steven Spielberg’s ability to make great films? Are we all of a sudden going to be flooded with a thousand Steven Spielbergs?” The excitement was, “Oh my goodness, I can be Steven Spielberg, and I can take over the world.”

The reality is something very different happened. Steven Spielberg is still the only Steven Spielberg. And the great films that we watch, whether that’s Maverick or Barbie or Oppenheimer, are still extraordinary entertainment. And as a global community of entertainment fans, we consume more of that content on movies and television than we ever have.

But this other thing happened, which was cat videos became get-ready-with-me videos and became Mr. Beast, and we got a whole new category of entertainment, and the two sit symbiotically together.

What if we give our global community of players access to all of the AI tools we use to build games, and let them create whatever they want? What if we actually let our players take these characters that are in the games, that are now infused with AI, build meaningful two-way relationships with them, and let them take them beyond the bounds of games, and do things with them more broadly in their digital lives?

And then what happens if we slam those two things together and we create new forms of social ecosystems where the interactions move beyond just chats and sharing video and into game-like experiences?

That’s super early experiments, but we do think that AI supercharged our existing business, it supercharges our creators, it allows us to do more interesting and more compelling, and more immersive, and certainly bolder things in the context of traditional video games. But we also believe that with the utilization of this technology, we can actually be leaders in creating new forms of interactive entertainment, and we’re equally excited about that.

Copy LinkAmbitions of building the biggest IP in the world

SAFIAN: The way popular culture and media often talk about gaming, it gets second-class status in some ways compared to Hollywood and other kinds of entertainment. The Emmys happen, the Oscars happen, but there’s not a red carpet event for games the same way. Does that eat away at you? Do you think that’s going to change?

WILSON: I love Hollywood. I love film. I love television.

The reality is, though, as we look at the future of entertainment, an entertainment company of the future that has IP at the center is going to have to deliver experiences that are both passive and interactive.

Real and virtual. These growing communities that we’re seeing today, who are choosing games as their first form of entertainment, who are being introduced to sports and IP first through games before they ever watch anything on television, aren’t going to reject the notion of watching things on television or on a cinema screen. What they’re going to say is, “I want to interact with my friends in a deeply socially connected ecosystem across the full spectrum of entertainment, both passive entertainment, where I’m sitting and watching, and interactive entertainment, where I get to participate in the telling of this story.”

And so, I think what we’re going to discover is it’s not going to be about — is Hollywood better than games or are games better than Hollywood? — it’s about actually what our players, what our fans, what our customers are going to expect is that they can enjoy the full spectrum of entertainment.

So, I think it will all just come together. I do think some of the biggest IP in the world on a five to ten-year time horizon will be video game IP. There’s no world where that doesn’t happen. If you look today at Marvel, everyone goes, “Wow, Marvel’s this incredible thing, it’s these incredible films, it’s incredible television, it’s incredible merchandise.”

Well, it’s not that long ago that Marvel was the subject matter of comic books on the bottom shelf of the back row of your local newsagent. If you look at where video games are today, it would not be unnatural to believe that the characters from Apex, the characters from The Sims, the things that you do in Battlefield, the worlds and stories that you live out through Skate, aren’t the biggest IP and the biggest experiences that you enjoy on a daily basis in the world on a 5 to 10-year time horizon — that would not be unnatural for us.

Copy LinkReflections on the Metaverse

SAFIAN: Last time you were on the show, which was back in 2021, we talked a bunch about the Metaverse, which at that point was kind of the rage, right?

You had a particular perspective about sort of how it might be applied to kind of worlds that EA is part of. Do you still think and talk about Metaverse, or is that a word, a concept that sort of has moved off?

WILSON: I think the word itself was always misunderstood by many.

For us as game makers, we feel like we build worlds that people live in every day. I do think this notion of a blurring of the lines between the real world and the virtual world. The blurring of the lines of the characters and people that you interact with, with both, and the personal nature of those relationships that you have. I do believe we continue to move on that journey. It’s the same place we were in the last time we spoke. I just don’t think it has a cool buzzword name to it.

SAFIAN: And this blurring of the lines — I mean, there’s some people who get very anxious. Or they’re wary about what the blurring of these lines is going to do to humanity. You’re not particularly worried about that?

WILSON: As a species now, I think we spend as much time on the internet as we do almost anything else in our lives.

The internet permeates every aspect of our daily life. So this notion of the blurring of the lines between real and virtual — that’s already happened. I mean, that toothpaste is out of the tube. I think what we’re talking about is making the virtual experience richer, more interesting, more immersive, where you can do more things that feel more like the things you do in the virtual world — not actually to take away from the virtual world, but to enhance the reality. The reality is, as a species, humanity loves being together. Contact is important for us. COVID taught us this. While COVID was a tremendous accelerator of our business, as soon as COVID ended, I was at a concert that had 50,000 people at it. So that just told me that this fear that humanity is going to only reside in virtual worlds is probably an unfounded fear.

What I do think is true is that we have the ability to fulfill needs and motivations in a virtual context as part of these rich worlds, interacting with these rich characters, participating, telling, writing these rich stories that enhance our real lives in a way that, if we get it right, will be very profound.

Copy LinkLessons from Brazilian jiu-jitsu

SAFIAN: You and I have known each other for a while, but we haven’t talked at all about your black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I’m curious, like, how and why you got into it, what it does for you and whether it sort of impacts the way you run the company, the way you lead?

WILSON: I mean, again, I’m not that big as it turns out. And I come from the wrong side of town. So I started martial arts very young. I started in Taekwondo, which is what a lot of kids start into.

As a kind of growth-minded human, I’d moved from Taekwondo to karate because I thought karate was going to make me tougher than Taekwondo. I moved from Muay Thai from karate because I thought Muay Thai was going to be more practical than karate was.

So I’d been on this quest of always trying to find the best way to defend my small self.

What jiu-jitsu tells you is as a small person, you don’t necessarily have to fear the big person. So in business relative to an Apple, or a Google, or an Amazon, we’re like tiny — we’re like 120 pounds relative to their 350. And so jiu-jitsu tells you that with the right technique, the right preparation, the right planning, you don’t have to fear the big person. But at the same time, if you are the bigger person, you should absolutely fear the smaller person if they are effectively trained.

And so as a company for EA, we sit in this space. We’re also bigger than a lot of other smaller companies. We can’t be so arrogant to think that because we’re bigger than they are, that they can’t unseat us, or they can’t usurp us, or they can’t do things that we can’t do. So you are always looking at both the bigger competitor and saying, “I don’t necessarily have to be scared — probably should be cautious, but I don’t have to be scared.” But you’re also looking at the smaller company and saying, but, “Hey, I shouldn’t ignore you. I shouldn’t be arrogant. I shouldn’t be overconfident.”

But yeah, I still train every week. Nothing keeps you real like people choking you unconscious.

Copy LinkHow EA’s Andrew Wilson plays video games

SAFIAN: I’m curious. Do you play a lot of games? Do you do much gaming yourself? Or is that not a release for you, because you’re thinking about what it means for the business all the time?

WILSON: I spent a lot of my time in the company, certainly the first 13 years, building games.

And so it was really work at that point because I was playing the games that I was working on, and I was playing the competitor’s games. And that actually left little time to play other games, as it turns out. When I moved into a more executive role, I actually got to play more things. But now I had the responsibility to play all things. So that, in fact, was work as well. Fun work. Even when it is work, the playing of games is fun.

What’s happened now is I have a 12-year-old daughter who is mad for The Sims, and I have a nine-year-old son who is mad for our sports games in Apex. So now as a dad, I get to sit down and play games with them.

And I would tell you, that may be the most fun I’ve had playing for the best part of 30 years.

SAFIAN: Talking with Andrew, his enthusiasm is just irrepressible. I’ll say that I’ve never had another CEO talk to me about someone choking them unconscious. What I most come away with, though, is reinforcement about the incredible appeal that games have, particularly with younger generations. I’m not a gamer myself, but the expectations, the habits, and the cultural impact of gaming are like a window into the future. Whether we’re talking sports, movies, or AI, we can’t afford to be noobs. Did I use that term the right way? I’m Bob Safian, thanks for listening.