EA Wants To Build Franchises In The Disney Model
EA wants to take Disney’s business model into gaming, according to new statements from the publisher’s CEO. At Q&A session for the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference, transcribed by Seeking Alpha, Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson talked about the company’s business model and what cues it is taking from Disney. Wilson claimed that Disney “had this idea of [building] these flywheel[s] of experiences around core IP.”
That flywheel includes movies and TV of course, but expands into Disney’s theme parks, merchandise, and even housing projects. For example, consider the idea of “Disney adults” or the company’s acquisition and stewardship of Star Wars and Marvel. EA wants to bring that out into the communities and IP it already controls. Wilson said, “If you stop now and fast forward, the biggest IP on the planet actually are video game IP. If we look at Apex or The Sims, we have hundreds and hundreds of millions.” Basically EA owns IP that operate at a similar scale to some of Disney’s offerings.
Therefore, EA is looking to expand to its business in similar ways. A large amount of the cultural power of big EA franchise like FIFA or Apex Legends comes from communities watching and discussing the game, rather than playing it. He said, “of our 700 million people in our network about half of them are deeply engaged in user-generated content. So this is a big part of the engagement flywheel for our future.” He also claimed that this business model has begun redefine play. He elaborated, “so in the old world, play was for five weeks, it was offline. It was single player. We made it multi-play, we took it online, you now play 365 days a year.”
If you are hoping that EA might loosen its grip on BioWare so they could kickstart a new setting, or that it might let Respawn make another Titanfall campaign, you will likely be disappointed. Wilson said, “What you’re going to see from us is really double down and reallocate investment towards these 5 or 6 massive global online communities that we have the benefit of growing.”
In other EA related news, developer Respawn has multiple “exciting” projects in the pipeline. EA Sports WRC was recently announced as is an apparent successor to the Dirt franchise.
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