EA Sports FC 24 on track to beat FIFA 23

EA Sports FC 24 has had a successful launch and EA expects "modest growth" for the title year-on-year, CFO Stuart Canfield said during the firm's earnings call for Q2 FY2024.

FIFA 23 was particularly successful last year due to the World Cup, so that was an interesting context for FC 24 to launch in. But Canfield said that the transition to EA Sports FC was a "huge achievement for EA," with the firm's "global football business" exceeding its expectations significantly during Q2.

"Net bookings [for the global football business] grew 41% year-over-year, driven by continued momentum of FIFA 23, including triple digit mobile net bookings growth, and strong demand for the release of EA Sports FC 24," he said.

"Within the first four weeks after worldwide launch, over 14.5 million fans have played FC 24 on console and premium PC, including double-digit growth in new players. FC Mobile has established new franchise records, with over two million people installing the game on the first day, over five million in the first three days, and over 11 million in the first ten days."

Later in the earnings call, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha, EA CEO Andrew Wilson answered a question about the pacing of sales for FC 24, and whether the firm expects any changes to past trends as a result of the rebrand.

Wilson said EA is planning for two potential outcomes: sales being overly strong at launch because of the excitement generated by the rebrand, or a longer tail as things slowly fall into place.

"We feel very good about the launch so far. We've certainly brought in a meaningful amount of net new fans and net new players in the ecosystem, which is always an incredible sign and prediction for the future. We also know we still have a meaningful amount of people playing the previous game.

"And as we're starting to see, and it's less about the FC transition and more about our live service business in general, as we think about live services, we're seeing the transition from one launch to the next, be a little bit more organic. And certainly, as we have supported the live services right up until the new launch. There's often [a] very good reason for people to continue playing the previous game. And so I do believe that we brought in new fans through an incredible game experience and incredible marketing, but we also recognise that we still have a meaningful population playing the previous game, and we're now working very deliberately and diligently to bring those over to FC and continue to grow the base of FC on a go-forward basis."

Looking ahead, Canfield said that the EA Sports FC franchise remains on track for a "low single-digit growth" for the year.

You can read more about EA's results for Q2 in our writeup. Elsewhere in the earnings call, Wilson also said the publisher is seeing 'softness' in Europe when it comes to video games spend.

We talked to EA in September about life after FIFA with the launch of FC24, and its mission to find 1 billion fans.

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