‘We’re at the white-hot center of the future of sport’: A Q&A with EA Sports svp Andrea Hopelain

By Alexander Lee

Electronic Arts had a banner year in 2021. The game developer’s earnings nearly doubled between Q2 2021 and Q2 2022, reflecting the increasing prominence of video games as a tentpole of popular culture. Over the last 12 months, EA has capitalized on this good fortune through a flurry of M&A activity, including its $2.1 billion acquisition of mobile developer Glu Mobile and its $1.2 billion purchase of racing game company Codemasters.

Digiday spoke to EA Sports svp of global brand management Andrea Hopelain to learn about the strategy behind the company’s biggest successes of 2021 — and how EA hopes to invest in this momentum in the new year.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

How has activity in EA Sports titles increased over the past year?

This has been a massive year of momentum for us at EA Sports. The lines between sports, gaming and entertainment are blurring at an increasing rate, and it has resulted in one of the biggest years that we have ever had. FIFA is at an all-time high — we just launched our best and biggest game ever with FIFA 22, and we’ve had more than 100 million fans inside of the franchise in the last six months. In Madden, we’re seeing engagement continue to soar week-over-week, and even with Formula 1, or F1 2021, that’s one of the top-rated games of the year, and we’ve seen double-digit growth on that business.

When I talk about momentum — we’ve reached more than 230 million fans this year at EA Sports, and I don’t see any reason for us to doubt that we don’t have the ability to continue to accelerate. I have my sights set on us hitting 500 million fans in the next couple of years.

The convergence of traditional sports fandom and gaming has been driven by individual creators in the streaming space. What is EA doing to support individual creators working with its games?

Working in a creative industry, it is our job to support the creator economy, right? And nothing is more powerful than our fans, who are as creative as we are. We love the creative community. For the last decade, we’ve had our Game Changer program, where we’ve worked really closely to bring creators behind the curtain and into the fold of our development process.

A decade later, we’ve just debuted our creator network, which is an evolution of that program. What it does is double down on our vision of what creativity looks like and broaden the capabilities, or even the types of creativity, that we want to celebrate. It’s not just someone who’s really great at streaming: it could be a photographer, or a writer, or someone who’s really great at drawing. So what I love about our program today is that it continues to give all sorts of diverse creators authorship and producer power with us.

During the outpouring of abuse and misconduct allegations …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron