EA boss Andrew Wilson offered a pretty lukewarm outlook for the firm’s mobile efforts within the company’s financial reporting and earnings call yesterday.
The publishing giant announced its latest financials as it continues to merge its mobile and ‘HD’ teams for flagship games EA FC, Madden and The Sims. It also recently cancelled ongoing development of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-Earth, Tap Sports Baseball and F1 Mobile.
In early 2023, EA also closed Apex Legends Mobile, cancelled Battlefield Mobile and shut down its developer Industrial Toys. We later discussed the demise of Battlefield Mobile and Industrial Toys with founder Alex Seropian.
CEO Wilson said in EA’s Q4 24 earnings call that the company expects “low to mid-single-digit growth” in its mobile business over the next year.
“The mobile market remains a fairly high-risk opportunity that requires significant user acquisition costs to kind of ramp a new mobile game,” he said. Wilson also described difficulties with increasing development cycles, user acquisition and “long ramp times once you get to market”.
He concluded: “Mobile isn’t an easy market to capitalise on.”
Wilson added that outside of core franchises FC, Madden and The Sims, EA’s forthcoming Skate game will be “mobile native”. Beyond that, he said that EA is also “looking at opportunities to invest in a very limited number of mobile native titles”.
EA reported mobile net bookings of $1.187bn in its FY 24 results, down 5% year-over-year, with $298m in net bookings for Q4 24 (down 10%).
EA’s net bookings for FY24 overall were up 1% year-over-year to $7.430bn (up 3% in constant currency). Q4 24 net bookings were $1.666bn, down 14% YoY.
