Record earnings in 2017. Joining me today on bloomberg studio 1. 0, Electronic Arts ceo Andrew Wilson. Lets start at the beginning of your time at ea. 2013, the company was struggling financially. The consumerist named you the Worst Company of the year two years in a row, but today, it is different. You have reported record profits. What did you do differently . Andrew i have been in the Company Since 2000. In 2013, they made me ceo. Emily i dont think that is quite true. Andrew somewhere in there is some truth. We had struggled. It wasnt because we were a bad company or made bad games. It is because we lost our focus. We said, what is the most important thing . Who facilitates us to do what we love . Make games. That is the player. We started every conversation for the longest time and continuing today is, is this good for the player . What you discover, it feels like an age ago now, but it is still the forefront of our memory, is there was a bunch of stuff that we were doing they did not like. There was a bunch of stuff they expected us to be doing and we werent. When you run a public company, that is challenging and you have to make sure the games are great, scalable. Emily tell me some of the hard decisions you made . Andrew just after i got the role, we launched battlefield 4. Biggest firstperson shooter game of the year. It struggled with scalability. Just the infrastructure. We had to make a judgment. We are not going to deliver more paid content until we fix this for our gamers. A year later, we were launching another battlefield game and it was not quite ready. If you follow our industry, what you know is, firstperson shooters always launch in the First Quarter right before the , holidays. We had to make a decision for our players. We held it. That was the big move to hold the biggest game in the biggest quarter and ship it six months later. Once players see that, they recognize we were serious. We have made a series of decisions like that in service of our player. You look after them, they look after you. Emily what are you excited about most this year . Andrew everything we do is fun and exciting, but reaching people through new platforms, mobile, new games, new Business Models and new geographies, more people play games now than ever before. That is exciting. When you are not building for a hundred million people, but 2. 5 billion people, then you can do impressive and wonderful things. Emily you mention mobile, how much money are you making for mobile . Andrew mobile is a growing business. We had more downloads than any other publisher last year. Madden is top of the charts. Star wars continues to do well. Emily do you wish you had a candy crush, angry birds . Andrew angry birds has been and gone. I think candy crush is a tremendous game. The mobile business is tough, but we have a madden. It is right up there with candy crush. We have a star wars galaxy of heroes. We expect the sims is a big opportunity for us. Emily the Competitive Landscape is changing and your competitors keep raising the bar. How would you describe the competition . Andrew the competition for time, not just people who make videogames, people who make movies, books, tv, music. It is sports we play, family time. We are working on building experiences that enhance all of those things. We are not trying to take away from peoples lives. We are trying to be additive to it. In a world where people are doing more things at once than they have ever done before, the notion that 24 hours in a day is an impediment is no longer an issue for us. I look at my daughter who is five years old and does seven things at once. Our job is how can we enhance their lives and enhance enjoyment and entertainment value. Emily i think the popular perception of games is that it is a time suck, they are detracting from your life, especially as you get a generation of children getting there cues from games. Is it true that games are improving their lives . Andrew games allow you to build selfesteem by overcoming challenges. It is about selfworth and self actualization. We build sandboxes they give people the opportunity to create. When we think about why people play games, immersion, social connection, competition, creation, selfimprovement. These are all core motivators of why people play. For kidso play who play sports games their , sports iq is higher than professionals. Emily how did you get into the Gaming Business . Andrew i had worked in the internet business. I had been involved in content creation and creative. I was a very diligent sports person, surfing, rugby, and it was a little studio from a Company CalledElectronic Arts making a surfing game, a rugby game and had all these engineers, but did not really have anyone who knew about sports. I got the opportunity to work for ea. I thought, this will be fun, i will do this for a couple of years and then get a real job. 18 years later, here i am. Emily women have been for so long underrepresented in game makers and in gaming themselves. What kind of progress are you making . Emily women have been for so long underrepresented in game makers and gaming themselves. Not just underrepresented it, but portrayed negatively. What kind of progress are you seeing . Andrew i think we are making tremendous progress. For the longest time, it was probably 90 males who play games, 10 females. That is not an inviting environment. Now it is almost 5050. We have some work to do on the environment, but when we think about how we portray women in games, we added National Womens teams in our fifa game. We added the wnba. Our lead character in star wars this year is a woman. These are not the women that you may have seen in videogames 10 years ago. These are strong, powerful, inspiring leaders that our young women playing these games can look up to and be inspired by. There is not gratuitous violence against women. The way we clothe them is appropriate. That is important to us. That is not something we mandated as a company. It is something our company believed in intrinsically. As we think about real representation of women inside our games it means also changing the representation of women inside our company. We are making headway there. We have a long way to go. We have a lot of great senior creative and business leaders, including members of our board. Third, which is perhaps the greatest place we can have the impact, inside our communities. We reach hundreds and hundreds of millions of people around the globe and we are trying to foster an inviting and Inclusive Community among gameplayers. We are trying to change the conversation. We believe by the leadership position we have, we can do that. We are actively taking action around that. Emily Online Harassment is a problem in general, especially for women on social networks and games themselves. How do we make the environment better for women inside these multiplayer communities . Andrew we believe in a diverse, inclusive environment for men and women. And other minority groups, for that matter. Games should bring us joy and happiness and extend the wonderful things in our lives, and we are taking action. Our Global Community group spends every minute of every day looking at every conversation happening in and around our games and looking for opportunities, not just to badness but also to encourage the goodness. As the father of a fiveyearold girl, that is important to me. As a father of a twoyearold son, i want him to grow up and understand this is an everybody issue. As a boy i want him to grow up , in support of things in service of his sister where she can be anything she wants. Emily the gamer Gate Campaign led to widespread harassment of women in the gaming industry on social networks. Why do you think that happened . Andrew it was a multifaceted problem and very disappointing for me. We worked really hard to try and quell that and move people on and help people understand. I think that when you get anonymity in the internet, people have the willingness to behave in a way that is unacceptable. We want people to understand that is not acceptable and foster an inclusive, diverse, welcoming culture for men and women. Emily would changing anonymity or requiring People Choose their real names, is that an option . Andrew i think that is an internet problem. We will do all we can to solve the problems we can and be a voice for change and a catalyst for the positive movement that is a diverse, inclusive culture. Gaming was criticized for not speaking up, was that fair . Andrew everybody involved in that was criticized by verys parties. We came out and clearly stood by, for us, diversity, inclusion, both in our games, in our employee base, in our community. We were very solid on that. We will continue to do that. I dont spend a of time talking politics, but do spend as much time as i can upholding the values of our company. Emily riot games did an interesting study of behavior found that just kicking out the bad players didnt change so much, that the negative behavior continued. What did make the change was changing the rules and trying to enforce the norms of positive behavior. Are you seeing that . Andrew the appropriate representation of women in our games is a big change and a big shift, because not only does that act as an inspiration for young women who are playing our games, who see these characters in our games who are strong, powerful, and independent, it also helps the boys playing the games that that is exactly as it should be as well. They shouldnt be fearful of this, back away from this, a world where we have equal voice in equal position in the community is a world we want to live in. We spent a lot of time trying to amplify that message among young boys and girls. We are seeing positive change. Emily there is concern that these issues could get worse as we move into Virtual Reality. There was the story about a woman being groped in Virtual Reality. Is this a cause for concern . Andrew i dont know whether it is cause for concern. I think we have to be deliberate about how we make these moves and the behavior we condone in these environments. We have to be deliberate about the game design and how it facilitates interaction inside Virtual Worlds because we do know that there are people in this world who dont behave the right way. We cant be the global censors of all behavior, but we have to be deliberate about the behavior we encourage in our Virtual Worlds, and we are spending time thinking through at a design level, platform level. At an interaction level. Emily is Virtual Reality living up to the hype . Andrew hype is a weird and wonderful thing. We all won virtualreality to be want virtualreality to be the thing we dreamed of as young people. We want to immerse ourselves in experiences we would otherwise never have the chance to experience. We want to overcome a spatial disconnect between us and our tv screen. We wanted to allow us to meet people and do things we could not otherwise do. So anything that has innovative technology, Consumer Value proposition, low barriers has a big opportunity. Emily tell me about your vr efforts and ar efforts. Andrew we have a single engine for all our games. We launched a game last year and are working on a mobile game. We have both ends of the spectrum. We have to understand how to develop at a core engine level. Lets implement that. The other big challenge is designed. The three biggest categories are actionadventure, firstperson shooter, and sports. All of which is challenging inside of vr right now. Emily we have seen pokemon go, the combination of augmented reality and locationbased services, what do your efforts look like . Andrew pokemon go gave us a sense of what might be possible. It was a catalyst for thought. When we look at ar and the things apple and google are providing for us in mobile, think about any information that may overlay an experience to enhance that experience. That might be geolocation, other things you do in your life, what your friends are doing, what is in your calendar, what is in your fridge. We are looking at how many strings of information does any player have available to them and how might they use those streams of data to extend and enhance their experience so that when i am playing the sims, the amount of eggs in my fridge might have an impact. It might mean that when im playing madden mobile, when im at a game i have access to different players then when im not at again. At a game. If i am at soccer practice, i am rewarded when im back to playing my fifa game. We are thinking about this notion of mixed reality not just in terms of geoservices, but how many streams of data are available and how might we use those to enhance the play experience. Emily we have not seen cloudbased gaming takeoff. There is no netflix of gaming yet. Does that change . Emily we havent seen cloudbased gaming take off. There is no netflix of gaming, yet. Does that change . Andrew the greatest disruptor to the consumption of Media Entertainment has been streaming plus subscription. Way we watchd the television, listen to music, read books. The notion a impact our industry the notion that it would not impact our industry is naive. Will it take longer . Yes. For a bunch of reasons, file size, design. When you listen to a led zeppelin album on your phone, car, or pc, it doesnt change. When we design a game that lives in a streaming world, we have to think about screen size. How does a madden in the cloud manifest on your mobile phone . How does that manifest on your 60 inch tv, and how does it manifest on the dashboard of your car as you drive to work . It is a design challenge. We have Technology Challenges with bandwidth and file sizes. We have design challenges, screen to seen, i do believe it will play an important part in our world in the future the same way it does with movies, tvs, books. Emily your competitors are selling franchises to their games for millions of dollars. What is eas strategy . Andrew we launched our second year for madden competitive gaming. We were the first partner of an official Sports League where we got all teams and all players involved. We are excited about that. We are going into the second year of our fifa competitive gaming and we have battlefield competitive gaming coming. We saw exponential growth and engagement. People who engaged engaged at three times the rate of people who didnt, so we have maintained for some time that competitive gaming is a way to engage a player base. The two greatest positive motivators of human behavior, social connection in competition. Emily how big do think esports will be . Andrew human beings love to watch anything where the best in the world are doing it and the stakes are high. Take something that literally 2. 5 billion people do on the planet and you have an audience ready to engage. What we are seeing now is the great players amongst those 2. 5 billion players are rising to the top and the stakes are high. When you watch our games being played, it is true entertainment. They are the best in the world doing it and the stakes are high. Emily rogue one, the force awakens, overall Merchandise Sales are slower than when disney first came out with the reboot. Can your Star Wars Battlefront two game do as well as the first. Andrew what they said about our first battlefront game was this is an amazing game, but it needs to be bigger, broader, deeper, Single Player campaign, space battles, more complexity in player evolution inside the game, so we have built a game that is three times the size of the first one. It is three times broader, deeper, Single Player campaign. We are doing everything we can in our power to deliver to our large Star Wars Community the game they want. Emily how do you think about the potential to deepen your relationship with disney . Andrew we have a great relationship with disney. They have some wonderful ip. If there was an opportunity to do more with them we would because they have in wonderful partners. We complement what they do. If there is an opportunity, we would jump at the chance. Emily would there come a day when you dont release new titles on your franchises every year and just release online content like take two with grand theft auto . Andrew the short answer is yes. A few things have to happen first. We do a lot in fifa and with madden. There is a lot of code we make available as part of the new iteration. In korea or china, we dont do it that way. Every four years we release a new big code drop and offer incremental change over time. What we see in korea and china and mobile is a world that might happen in other parts of our business. Emily apple has been pushing to become a bigger platforming games. Platform in games. It hasnt happened. Do you think that will happen for apple . Andrew the app store is a big business, and games have been the lions share of that business. What were starting to see now is Subscription Services like spotify, netflix, youtube, tidle rise to the top of the app charts because apple and others understand subscription is a really valuable way to engage with the consumer base. Valuable for the person providing the subscription, and value for subscriber. It is a friction free way of ingesting large amounts of content. I think they are doing a great job and you will continue to see games as part of their app store but what you might start to see is the Business Model around games change, and we are getting ready for that. Emily how will the Business Model change . Andrew free to play is a wonderful Business Model that has allowed mobile to become as big as the console platforms in terms of overall game revenue, but we are seeing a propensity for App Store Users to engage in netflix and spotify and pandora and random dating apps through subscription. We are saying is there a way we can offer great values to players