Welcome to EA's Analyst Day. It's great to see so many of you here today. I'm just going to run through. My name's Chris Evenden. I'm the VP of IR here at EA. I'm just going to briefly run through some logistics before we get on with the presentations, with the real content, as it were. You have power at the front of your desks, if you noticed that. Snacks will be available throughout the day in the corner there. Restrooms are at the back on the right. Just to round out Maslow's hierarchy of needs, there are 10 cards on the table to give you the SSID and the password as well. We have a packed morning ahead of you. We've got representatives from EA's executive management team. They'll let them introduce themselves and run through the content.
Fortunately, I'm not asking anyone else to read that out. We're now going to start with a short video. Then Andrew will come on stage and give you a view into the company. Thank you. We're going to skip through this and this. Thanks to everyone who came last night and had some drinks, and we got some early questions and some chit-chats. Thanks for being here today. We've got long-time investors, recent investors, long-time analysts covering us, and some people who have just started covering us more recently. We're at a really, really, really amazing time in our industry. We're going to spend a lot of time today giving you a sense of why we believe Electronic Arts we are uniquely positioned to benefit from macro-industry growth. At the very core, our industry is growing at a player level.
As long as there are more players, there is greater opportunity for us. When I started this business in the year 2000, we would squint to see 200 million players. Most people, if you asked them what a gamer looked like, they would say a gamer is a 14-year-old boy who spends a great deal of time playing games in his mother's basement. Today, I would argue that almost everyone in this room is a gamer. You may not have played on a console, you may not have played on a PC, but you likely have played something on a mobile device. That's a tremendous onboarding device for us as we think about mobile as a business overall, but also to bring new people into the funnel and convince them that games are, in fact, the best form of entertainment.
As long as there are more players, there is greater opportunity for us. When I started this business in the year 2000, we would squint to see 200 million players. Most people, if you asked them what a gamer looked like, they would say a gamer is a 14-year-old boy who spends a great deal of time playing games in his mother's basement. Today, I would argue that almost everyone in this room is a gamer. You may not have played on a console, you may not have played on a PC, but you likely have played something on a mobile device. That's a tremendous onboarding device for us as we think about mobile as a business overall, but also to bring new people into the funnel and convince them that games are, in fact, the best form of entertainment.
Given all of these new players, we end up with more people playing more games on more platforms through more geographies and through more business models than ever before. Part of what's happened in our industry is we've had this unbelievable evolution that said we understand that when you consume media, you consume it different ways in different contexts. Just the same as you watch television on a big screen TV, you might watch it on your computer screen in your office, or you may watch little snippets on your iPhone, or in fact go and sit in front of an IMAX theater screen, the same is true for games. As more platforms have got to a point where they could deliver interactive entertainment, we've had more people play.
As we have changed the nature of the games we make in geography, culturalization of our games, we've got more people playing. As we've given a more diverse set of business models, we've said we love it when you give us $60 upfront. We think that's great, and we're going to continue to provide you value. At the same time, we also understand there is a real movement on certain platforms in certain geographies where you start for free. Then we convince you that the things that we're making are so positively profound that you are willing to give us both your time and your money. Then at the other end of the spectrum, the notion of subscriptions that says, "Hey, I don't want money to come between me and my gaming experience. I want to give you an amount of money.
I appreciate that you build great content, and I'm going to build a relationship with you over time." We're going to talk a little bit more about that today. Our world is growing, again, as you always want to be in an industry where you see the line going up and to the right. The more interesting thing about this slide is there is consolidation afoot. In almost every media and entertainment business on the planet, as the industry has grown, there has been consolidation, whether it's movies, music, TV, books. Games are no different. We're seeing great consolidation in terms of the top titles driving a great deal of market share. We're seeing fewer companies who are well-positioned for the future driving those top titles.
As we look to the future, we believe there's going to be a real opportunity for a network multiplier, how you bring people in, build relationships with them, and facilitate connections between them in a social interactive phase, and with them and games across devices. We're going to talk a little bit more about that today. The big news, of course, and the thing that makes our industry most interesting is it's becoming more digital. That continues to grow, and that doesn't look like it's going to stop anytime soon, in no way different from any other media or entertainment business. The thing is, brands are rising to the top. In the early phases of mobile, in the early phases of PC free-to-play, in the early phases of digital, anyone can kind of come in and build something and hope for the best.
What we're seeing today across all platforms, all devices, all business models is that brands are rising to the top. It's not just about brands. It's not just about downloading a single piece of content digitally. Social connection is key. More and more games are a form of social connection for every player in our industry. Beyond that, the expectation now is that I'm going to play games for a really long period of time in this digital ecosystem, and my expectation is that you're going to continue to update, extend, enhance, provide dynamic gameplay for me and my friends to play. As we think about Electronic Arts in that growth trajectory, right now we're 8,400 people. What I think is 8,400 of the best people in our industry who come to work every day to do amazingly creative things.
We're in 31 global locations, in our past fiscal year, we did $4.6 billion, and again, we've guided to growth in the coming fiscal year. As you start to look more deeply into us as an organization, it's really important to understand what our value system is. It's really important to understand those 8,400 people, what are they thinking about when they come to work every day? Typically, this wouldn't be something that would form part of an investor presentation, I thought it was really important for you to understand how we're made up. The fact that creativity is at the very core of everything that we do. The fact that pioneering is a value that we believe is our responsibility as a leader in the industry to continue to drive and do new things.
Passion is an important part of entertainment, that we are at our best when we're doing what we love. If you talk to anyone from Electronic Arts, they love coming to work every day and building amazing interactive entertainment. The determination is what got us to this point. Many people have judged Electronic Arts in the past and said, "We don't think they're going to make it. We don't think they can turn it around. We don't think they can transform." What our organization has done through determination has got us to this point. It's also determination that's going to get us through and forward around all the things we're going to talk to you about today. Learning. We're an organization that has learned how to get from high-def to mobile. We're an organization that has learned how to get from offline to online.
We're an organization that has learned how to get from units sold to hours engaged. We've done it as a team because there is an expectation at a player level that when you interact with any one of Electronic Arts' experiences, whether that's a game, whether that's a website, whether that's a trailer for one of our upcoming games, the expectation is that the experience is consistent and of a high quality. We can't do that with a siloed organization. Creativity, pioneering, passion, determination, learning, and teamwork. We believe entertainment is a fundamental human need. Chris referenced Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Once you get past air-food-water shelter, you get to social connection, sense of belonging. You get to self-esteem, overcoming challenges and building self-worth, and you get to self-actualization, creation in a living world. All of those things are embodied by entertainment.
We believe games are the most valuable form of entertainment given their ability to fulfill those fundamental human needs. I've already talked about the fact that games now are the predominant form of social connection for many of our players. We are providing challenge in the games we make, and people are growing inside those economies. In a world of digital content and user-generated content, we are providing self-actualization for a great many of our players. As we think about why we're here to exist, we think about it this way. We exist to inspire the world to play. We believe the world is a better place when we all make a little time to play, whether that's as a discrete experience in front of an 80-inch TV, or whether that's an indiscrete experience as a series of two-minute sessions on our iPhone.
We come to work every day with this in mind. How do we think about growing the community? Every day that we come to work and we believe there is some element of a community or some element of a country or some element of a group of people who have not yet been inspired to play, we see that as a call to action. As we talk to you today, what you're going to see is everything that we're doing is about building the growing player base around the world. It's about compelling them to invest both time and dollars into the things that we make because we believe we make them of a high quality, and we believe that we are fulfilling the fundamental human need for entertainment in doing so. How are we doing?
Right now, we've got over 300 million people in our database. The reality is we've probably got nearly double that number with varying levels of information. Our job is to grow that number and grow what we know about those players. Our expectation is that over the coming years, we will absolutely double that number and better. We're the number one publisher on HD consoles. Again, a great business, a business that's ahead of the curve of the last console generation where more people are logging in to play and playing more time and monetizing at higher levels. We're the number one most downloaded publisher on mobile devices last year. PC free-to-play, we're the number one sports game in both Korea and China.
In Korea, perhaps one of the most competitive free-to-play markets on the planet, FIFA Online 3 on any given day is in the top three. We've demonstrated an ability to deliver great content across console, across mobile, and across PC, across premium, across subscription, and across free-to-play. We've done that through what we believe is the most interesting, deep, broad portfolio of intellectual property as it relates to games on the planet. We have completely reoriented the company from shipping games to the provision of 24/7 live service, that social connection, that dynamic content. We've moved the company from what was 20-plus engines some years ago to being on a journey to get to a single engine, Frostbite.
At a question last night about, "What's the real value of that?" In a world where we no longer build for two or three platforms, but we build for 20 or 30, in a world where the transitions aren't every six years but maybe every six months, our ability to get all of our games to any and all new platforms that players want to play on is really, really important. What's more important is being able to do that in a cost-effective manner. When we went from PlayStation 2 to PlayStation 3, and I lived through that journey, our R&D costs almost doubled. The quality of our games on the new platforms was not that great.
The reason that was is because we were investing at a team level on every engine to get every game across at the low-level technology, not just at the feature set, but at low-level rendering technology, artificial intelligence, animation, audio. When we went from PlayStation 3 to PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 to Xbox One, we got more titles to launch than any other publisher at quality, and our R&D cost was essentially flat. You got high-quality games highly differentiated at a feature set level, but in a way that was cost-efficient and quick from an organization who had moved from 20 engines on a journey down to one. That's going to continue to pay dividends for us as we think about the future, as we think about multiple teams innovating on top of that.
That's going to make exponential leaps forward in its ability to deliver unbelievable games every year that we build with it. Lastly, our technology platform. You've heard us talk about this before. In a world where more people are playing more games across more platforms and connection with their friends is one of the most important things in their gaming life, having a single ID that travels with you, having a single set of infrastructure so your service is consistent, having it be secure, having a single data platform so that we have a 360-degree view of every single player in our database, the leverage that we're going to get out of that on a go-forward basis is going to be profound. We're going to talk a little bit more about how that feeds into our network over time.
I talk about the portfolio, and I talk about how we're delivering. I'm not going to go through every one of these, but it's a very diverse portfolio, and the reality is is this doesn't even cover all of them. We've got cupboards in hallways with unbelievable IP in them. Just like the movie business and the TV business has reaped benefits of going back into the closet and taking IP from many, many years ago and reinventing it for a future world, we believe we're going to be able to do the same thing as well. When you get all this right, you get unbelievable engagement. As a company, we've moved, and you've heard us talk about this, from just measuring ourselves by units sold to measuring ourselves in engagement. These are just a few numbers that highlight the level of engagement that we're getting.
54 million players in our sports games, 9.4 million active users in Q4 alone around our Battlefield franchise, months, years after launch. A mobile device. Again, a lot of people believe that mobile devices are too many experiences. We're getting, on average, two hours a day across Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, 1.5 billion matches played in FIFA in Q4. Amazing engagement, and it's happening because we've moved into the live services orientation. Again, I don't have to spend a lot of time on this slide because you know our story, or at least most of you do. We've gone from a world where we're making $3.8 billion and on the bottom line, a couple of hundred million, to adding $1 billion to the top line and $1 billion to free cash flow in a very short period of time.
The leverage that we have in our business is unbelievable. When we do the right things at a core technology level, when we do the right things at an organizational level where we focus on the properties that are going to drive the greatest entertainment for our players and the greatest growth for us as an organization, the opportunity is endless. As we think about the future, then where does growth come from? Well, at a very core, we're a games company, and we have this unbelievable core portfolio. FY 2017 alone, we're going to relaunch Mirror's Edge. I talk about taking a property that we haven't launched for a long time and reimagining it for a modern generation. We've got Mirror's Edge coming out first. We've got a whole suite of sports titles that are going to be the most innovative sports titles we've ever made.
They're going to make the biggest leaps in terms of technology, visual fidelity, and experience of anything we've done again, I came up in the sports business, what I think anything we've done for over a decade. Who's seen a Battlefield 1 trailer? You and 35 million of your closest friends. We set out on a journey with Battlefield to create an unbelievably epic war experience. The team said, "We want to build something that has unbelievable interlocking storylines. We want to build something that's truly global in scale. We want to build something where the weaponry evolves over time dramatically. We want to build something where the gameplay evolves over time dramatically that will engage players not just for weeks and months but for years." World War I was the setting.
What you saw in our trailer was an opportunity to deliver for what gamers had been asking for, boots on the ground, all-out warfare with unbelievable epic gameplay at an epic scale. We also have Titanfall 2. Titanfall 1 was a spectacular launch property for us on the Xbox One. We're bringing it to the PlayStation this time as well, fast, fluid gameplay. Again, the shooter category is this giant category, $4.5 billion. We're a big player in that category but really only have about 25% market share. We believe that we are supremely well-positioned in FY 2017 with a combination of an epic-scale Battlefield and fast and fluid Titanfall to have tremendous growth in that category.
Finally, for the Mass Effect, a whole new Mass Effect story emerging, a fan favorite, something as a category, role-playing games or RPGs continues to grow and break beyond what was the core gamer audience. We've seen other games in the category do this, and we believe that Mass Effect will do that. On mobile, we're adding to our existing suite of strong live services that have been providing consistent mobile revenue growth with FIFA and NBA Live built and delivered in the same way we've built Madden. Again, we set up sports as a category on mobile devices this past year. We were told that, "Listen, don't worry about EA Sports on mobile because sports isn't really a category. Mobile gamers don't want to play sports, and sports fans aren't playing on mobile games." Madden proved that entire thesis wrong.
We're going to launch FIFA and NBA Live in the same way this year. We've got a great property in Plants vs. Zombies: Heroes, and we've just launched Bejeweled Stars, which, again, early days, but the feedback so far from players and press is that this is the most dynamic upgrade to the match-three genre they'd seen in a long list of clones. How do we grow beyond that? Where does the growth come beyond just organically getting more players to play in our core platform? We think about it on a few different vectors. There's portfolio growth. There's geographic growth. There's new engagement models that might come through platforms or business models. Ultimately, we have this unbelievable tailwind right now that is digital growth. As we think about portfolio growth, again, we are underrepresented in the action category.
You're going to hear how we're investing there and how we've got great leaders like Amy Hennig who came out of Naughty Dog and Jade Raymond who came out of Ubisoft that built Assassin's Creed who were investing in the action category. We're pushing into mobile. We're pushing into console. We're pushing into VR. We have been pushing into streaming. These are all opportunities for us to get more people playing more games across more platforms. Growth will be the result. As we think about a property like FIFA, I started work on FIFA in 2004, 2005. At that time, it was kind of a $200 million business, and it was kind of sold a little bit in the U.K., a little bit in Germany. America wasn't a particularly big territory for it. We weren't in Asia in any meaningful way.
We went through a systematic plan of taking FIFA into every country on the planet. We went out, and we got licensed content from Poland, from Greece, from South America, from Korea, from Japan, from China. We localized into more than 17 languages. We started to deliver through new business models, FIFA Online on PC, free-to-play in Korea. We believe there is a tremendous opportunity. We're just touching the surface of Asia and South America. If you think about the value of our IP in those markets, China is going to continue to grow around football. Need for Speed is a brand that resonates extremely well in China. In fact, the movie that we made, which most of you probably haven't seen, or at least I hope you haven't, went to number 1 in China, shows the value of the brand there.
We're going to continue to push in with local people on the ground. We have studios in Shanghai, Japan, Seoul, Korea, and we're looking at how do we push into South America. We are just scratching the surface. New engagement models. Again, I talked about how we've moved from a company that has been just a premium unit, things shiny discs in plastic boxes on retail shelves. Things like EA Access demonstrate to us the growth opportunity. It continues to engage players beyond our wildest expectations. Here's what we see. People who come into EA Access very often are new to EA. Even those who are with EA, more than 80% of them play a game of ours that they've never played before. When they play on two games inside of EA Access, they engage and monetize higher in both than non-EA Access players.
Those that play games inside of EA Access show a higher propensity to buy the new frontline title when it comes out. Given that we provide discounts against digital versions of that content, they have a much higher propensity to buy it through digital channels. It's not just about business model. Peter Moore is going to come and talk to you a lot about competitive gaming. There's been a lot of talk about competitive gaming and the elite level of gaming and the revenue that may be generated from broadcast rights and sponsorships and team ownership. Yeah, there'll be revenue there. That's going to take time just the same. Again, I grew up in sports. Broadcast rights, sponsorships, team ownership, that's a long journey, and it's a journey that we're going to drive towards. In the meantime, think about sport.
Rugby World Cup, it's tough to get broadcast rights for that. The UFC, which is one of the biggest growing sports on the planet, went out for an apparel sponsor, Reebok, I think, gave them $70 million over seven years. Giant brand, huge viewership. The sponsorship they were able to generate was $70 million over seven years. Here's the thing. Kids are out buying soccer boots and balls and socks and shorts and shirts and boxing gloves and skipping ropes and weights every day of their life the same way people are going to play FIFA Ultimate Team, Madden Ultimate Team, Hockey Ultimate Team at renewed levels of engagement as they aspire to get to that elite level. There's an opportunity. We could double Ultimate Team revenue through the ongoing push for engagement that comes from competitive gaming.
As we look to the future, again, we don't want to be limited. We don't want to have to take bets. What we want to be able to do is get to where players are playing in a way that they're playing. Our core Frostbite engine facilitates that. The breadth of our IP has broad-level appeal for a growing player base to the extent that it doesn't matter what it is, whether it's VR or AR or discrete gaming through an internet-enabled fridge that gives you rewards inside of FIFA for how much milk you have. We have an opportunity to benefit by virtue of how we've set the organization up and by virtue of the IP that we have and the connection that we have with the global player base. Digital growth, this amazing tailwind, provides us growth on three different vectors.
The first is we have a much deeper understanding of our player. We know more about what they want to play and, more importantly, where they're struggling with play. We know more about how to build just the right things for them and present them gameplay in just the right way that causes them to play more, bring their friends to play, and engage for much longer. We see, as a result of this, an elongation of both the engagement and the revenue curve. Looking here at Madden Ultimate Team, the reality is, for the longest time, people stopped playing Madden after the Super Bowl. In fact, a bunch of people stopped playing Madden as soon as it became apparent to them that their team wasn't going to make it into the Super Bowl.
Now what you see is we're getting long-term engagement and monetization through the delivery of live service to football fans around the world. You are seeing beats of engagement and monetization that are high well after the Super Bowl. Everything that happens in football life is an event in your football gaming life. Finally, it's higher margin revenue. It's higher margin for a couple of different reasons. One, we're not dealing with the issues around hard goods. I don't have to talk about it in detail. We've been talking about this a lot. You don't have to deal with warehousing. You don't have to deal with plastic. You don't have to deal with boxes. You don't have to deal with SRA. More importantly, we get tremendous leverage out of our R&D dollar.
The core investment that goes into FIFA every year that is then extended for at least 12 months of play beyond that comes at very high margin because we're delivering tremendous value to the player by extending and enhancing experience. They love to play with their friends, but we're able to do it with a much, much smaller team. That presents a profound opportunity as we think about the elongation of engagement in our games. Where do we go to from here? We've got this great core portfolio. We can see a world where portfolio growth, geographic growth, new engagement models through both new platforms and new business models, and digital as a tailwind is going to drive tremendous growth for us. How do we think about the future?
When we think about the future of more people playing more games, a couple of things are going to be true. One, I as an individual, I'm going to play games across more than one device. In fact, I'm going to play different games across different devices. I'm going to refresh those devices on a much faster cadence. Again, our industry operated for the longest time on a six-year refresh rate. Now it's a six-month refresh rate, and it's asynchronous with our friends. We don't all necessarily upgrade our phone or our TV at the same time. In that world, as we're moving from device to device, as we're moving across devices and across franchises, how do we find our games? How do we find our friends? The simple action right now of moving from an iPhone to an Android device is extraordinarily problematic if you're a gamer.
Finding friends in this new world that you're going into is really tough, especially if they all stay on an iPhone. Maintaining all of the progress that you have made in a game is really tough because it's setting on a different operating system. There is an opportunity for us as we think about the future through that core digital platform I talked about earlier, through a single ID, through a single data platform, through a single set of infrastructure, irrespective of what device you play on or when you upgrade that device, to keep you connected to your friends and keep you connected to the games you love. The opportunity here for us is to do this not just for us, but to do this for the industry. There's a world where other players in our space are going to want to get to gamers.
There's a world where other players in our space are going to want to participate in a connected, networked world where this is not just a database of players. A database isn't a network. A network is directly proportionate to the strength of the connections between players, and connections between player and game. What we know to be true is where players have 10 friends in a network, they are less likely to churn out of that network. What we know is where gamers play two games inside of a network, they're less likely to churn out of that network.
In a world where there are 1,000 new games hitting app stores every day, the opportunity for churn is great if you don't build a network, if you are not able to fulfill two fundamental player needs, which are remaining connected to their friends, remaining connected to the games they love, and then adding to that the provision of new things they might love. We're going to talk a lot more about this today. The opportunity. Billions of players as a network engaging daily, weekly, monthly, connected in-game and beyond in a growing digital world. We believe we are uniquely positioned to disproportionately benefit from this growth because I think we have the best talent in the industry. I think we have the deepest portfolio of IP both now and in development.
I think we have taken the time to invest in core technology both as a digital platform level and as an engine level, we have reoriented the company away from units sold to hours spent. What I hope you get today is a deeper understanding of that transformation. Thank you so much. Good morning, everyone. My name is Patrick Söderlund, and I run the EA Studios organization. This we don't need to cover. We'll pass this. I want to start by showing the trailer that Andrew spoke about, the Battlefield 1 trailer. Why don't we just run that first so you can see what it looks like?
Enemy flee.
Carroll dead.
Freak. OA. Get ready, man.
That's pretty cool. That was actually Battlefield was one of the first games that I ever worked on. The first Battlefield game 1942, Battlefield 1942, was something that I was a part of creating from my first apartment 15 years ago. This game is pretty close to my heart. The thing that Andrew spoke about in regards to the setting and why we decided to go for World War I, it wasn't the most obvious choice. If you look at what other partners are in our industry are doing, they're going into sci-fi. We've had a lot of success in the modern military space, but we felt like there was a need for a change. And when the team presented to me the idea of World War I absolutely rejected it. I said, "World War I is trench wars.
Anyway, the team continued and persisted in the fact that this can be fun and showed up with a very short demo that convinced me, at least, that this was the right path. The good news is whenever you take creative risk and it works, you actually can get to substantial success. I think what the internet is telling us with 31 million views and the most seen trailer in the history of EA is that I think the World War I theme is resonating with players out there. I think we have done something that I think will be right for the franchise and right for EA. As Andrew and I spoke about yesterday, we have to remember that so far, we've only showed one trailer.
Yes, it's gotten a lot of success, but what's important is now that we have to go back and make sure that we deliver on the full promise of what Battlefield can be, and that we will do. Over the next 25 to 30 minutes or so, I'm going to give you an insight into EA Studios, who we are, what we do, and how we do it. EA Studios is a large organization which actually represents about 80% of EA's total revenue and turnover. We're all about making the world's greatest games, telling great stories, and creating great gameplay experiences. It's kind of what we do. We have developed some of the most popular games in our industry: Battlefield, Mass Effect, Need for Speed, our whole EA Sports portfolio, of course, Dragon Age, Dead Space, and more. We have 13 locations around the world.
We're about 4,100 employees. We have four major development sites. We have Vancouver, which is the largest one, where we make FIFA, NHL, and UFC, Plants vs. Zombies, and a couple other things. We have Edmonton in Canada where the BioWare Studios sits, so Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and a couple of other things we're working on. Orlando, where we make our Madden business and NBA, and we will make golf. Stockholm in Europe is Sweden, where I'm from, where we make Battlefield and also where Star Wars Battlefront was made. We'll show you Mirror's Edge here in a second is also made there. Those are our major, kind of largest development hubs. Our studios range from about 120 to 1,000 people depending on where you are in the world. Andrew touched this briefly.
Our games portfolio, I believe that we probably have the most diverse game portfolio and IP portfolio of all publishers in the industry. If you look at the just sheer breadth of what we can offer, both from an IP but also from an experience and depth perspective on everything that we do, our sports portfolio, we have with all the sports games, we have Plants vs. Zombies, we have Titanfall, Battlefield, racing games with Need for Speed, our RPG category with probably one of the strongest development organizations in the world in BioWare with Dragon Age and Mass Effect. We have a large, diverse portfolio. Frankly, just like you guys, we manage risk. This is about breadth. This is about going as wide as we can but still keeping control of what we do.
For the sake of this presentation, I decided to split up our IPs into three categories. The first one is the intellectual properties that we own. If you think about it today, about 25% of the resources inside a studio organization today, so roughly 1,000 people, are working with new projects, new IPs, or incubation, new conceptual ideas, projects, R&D. That's a pretty large amount of people that doesn't work on maybe things that we have announced as of yet. Obviously, our own IPs are the cornerstone of our portfolio with Battlefield, Dragon Age, and the ones I've mentioned in the past. Andrew also mentioned Mirror's Edge, which is the first game that we launched in this fiscal year. I want to show you a trailer of that that we just launched online. Can we please run the Mirror's Edge trailer?
I once knew a young woman who would defy anyone and anything in order to do what she felt was right. You're clearly not her. You're broken.
Anything having to do with Gabriel Kruger, we need to stay miles away from.
Look, I thought that this would be a fun thing.
No, you didn't think, Faith. You never do.
Don't get lost.
Barely out of prison and already stirring things up? Your parents will be proud.
Mr. Kruger, he is out for runner blood. Whatever it is you stole from him must be very valuable.
Stop her. You keep this up, I swear you'll be dead in a month.
Using every weapon at our disposal, we've got to destroy it. Back off.
Kruger did this, and he'll be able to do it to anyone unless he stops.
Get out of my sight.
That is?
What else is there?
You're wrong. I'm not broken.
Prove it.
Well, they're fighting you after all.
I had a question yesterday during the cocktail discussions around Frostbite and engine and the fact that if you're moving all your games to one engine, aren't they all going to look the same? I think the first game that we showed, Battlefield 1, is running on Frostbite. The second game, this one we showed, is also running on Frostbite. The engine isn't actually a barrier for how a game looks and feels. It's totally up to the development team, to art direction, and how they choose to build the software. You've seen a lot of other games made in the industry using third-party engines. They kind of tend to look the same. I agree with that.
That is actually because when you don't own the engine and you have to use someone else's property, you can't change as many things as you can do when you control everything yourself. That's why we're going to get more into Frostbite a little bit later. That's just one piece that I felt I should touch when I saw this. The second category for us, which is not that, which is that, is obviously the licensed IP. This has been a tremendous success story for the company. Again, it's something that we value extremely. We have partnerships with among the best and biggest brands and IPs in the world. If you think about our whole sports portfolio and the success of that comes from deep partnership with the NHL, the FIFA, the NFL organization, and more.
We also have other types of licenses with Disney on Star Wars, which you've seen with Battlefront. Some of you were also asking questions around Star Wars yesterday, which we'll touch a little bit later. Again, in the spirit of showing more trailers, I'd like to show you a different trailer from NHL this year, which will give you kind of a sense of our vision for the game and how we bring it to life for our players. If we can please run the NHL video.
Legacies aren't shaped overnight. Whether they're built on the ice, behind the bench, or in the front office, no two NHL legacies are the same. We took that idea to heart when we set out to build NHL 17. From making that clutch save that changes the momentum of the game to battling for that critical inch in front of the net during the dying seconds, our focus is to make sure we're improving gameplay in all three zones. Through deeper and more customizable experiences in our most popular modes and by engaging fans across all aspects of development, we're creating new experiences that add up to our biggest and most exciting hockey game to date.
Whether it's shaping the future of your franchise, making a splash in international competition, or rewriting the record books, in NHL 17, you'll get to experience the defining moments that only hockey can deliver. No matter if you're challenging a friend on the couch or masterminding a team at the elite levels of competition, with NHL 17, you can shape your hockey legacy where it matters to you.
Categories, our own IP and licensed IP, represent what those 4,100 people work on on a daily basis. The third segment is external partners that we work with. Sometimes we choose to work with an external partner to create different experiences that we can't get to internally. It could either be a game ID or a team that has a specific talent that we feel like we should partner with because we don't have the opportunity to build that inside our own portfolio. Coldwood on the left here made a game for us called Unravel. It's a very different, maybe non-EA-like experience, but we felt like we wanted to bring that to players. When I saw the game, we just felt, "This game deserves to be built.
We should help them get this to market." As you probably saw today, we just signed a new agreement with Coldwood for the next version of Unravel. We have others like Hazelight, who we have only spoken about briefly, but you'll see more of a little bit later. Obviously, our partnership with Respawn is deep now today. With Titanfall, we are obviously working with them as we also announced on a Star Wars property that you will see more of a little bit later. The next thing we're going to show you, and I'll stop showing trailers in a second, but it's actually something that we have in common with the movie business. Big brands like Battlefield or Titanfall or FIFA, we will very often tease first. When you tease something, the reactions can be sometimes incredible, frankly.
When we released this trailer online, which is a very short kind of 20-second thing, we got a lot of really interesting questions. People loved what they thought they were seeing. What's interesting, the questions you get from people seeing this is so deep and so varied that you wonder, "What are they seeing? What am I missing?" Because it's only 20 seconds of basically nothing. They get super excited about the fact that we've confirmed that we're building it. The gamers out there love this kind of stuff. Let's just run this quickly.
People like you always want to be the hero. The problem with being a hero is you have to be willing to die for what you believe in. If I were you, I wouldn't try so hard. You'll live longer.
Yes. As you saw, not a whole lot. Again, the excitement it generated was pretty profound. This is also something that Andrew touched, which I believe is center and very important for not only studios but the whole company. Our industry has gone through a substantial shift in the last seven to five, seven years where we've gone from almost a fire-and-forget mentality where we would launch a game into market and then kind of let it sit and see what happens to now when we launch a game, it's almost like the start of a journey. This is when we get something in the hands of players, we will then start communicating with them and to see what they like and what they don't like about what we've made.
That gets us into the live service layer of the product, which means the game connects to you as soon as you turn it on or open it up. It means that for us, we are constantly monitoring what's going on. We run game updates. You can connect and play with other people if you want to. You can purchase more content or expand the game even more, which we'll talk about shortly. I believe that players today play fewer games because the ones that are out there that do the live service component layer well will actually drive longer engagement, meaning people will stay more connected and more loyal to games that they play. For us, this is really central to how we think.
If you look at what we've done with FIFA or with Battlefield or many of our other games, we can actually have people stay with us for the period of several years and continue playing our games instead of going to someone else's game. This creates happy, engaged players and expands revenue and margins for us, of course. If you look at our sports business and what we've done there, I think that I can say this without sounding arrogant. This is probably the most successful example of a console-based live service layer that I can think of. Last year alone, we launched more than 200 updates for our EA Sports games, 200. This means we have teams dedicated 24/7 to just updating and servicing the games that are out in the market.
We do things like roster updates, player events, and challenges that get connected to the real world of sports. Again, being Swedish, Zlatan Ibrahimović, a Swedish football player, is leaving Paris Saint-Germain. There was a big event around his final game and the fact that he scored two goals and was kind of the hero. That the next day is fed back into FIFA, and you can experience something similar in the FIFA game. We try and tie everything that happens in the real world to the games that people love to play. Obviously, one of the or the biggest success we've had, for sure, in monetizing and staying engaged with players is our Ultimate Team business. We've told you guys and the rest of the world that last year, we reached $692 million in revenue that was generated because of Ultimate Team.
I'm going to briefly touch on what Ultimate Team is. This is something that we have across FIFA. We have it across Madden NFL. We have it NHL, UFC, NBA. We have it in most of our sports games where it kind of fits and makes sense. The way it works is it's essentially a virtual trading card mechanic inside the games. What you do is you assemble your best team of players from packs that you can earn or buy. You can then trade or acquire individual players if you want to. There's a marketplace where you can sell, trade, or buy new players. What you then do is your goal is to create the best possible or your Ultimate Team.
You have to be kind of a manager over your own sports team and pick players that you buy or acquire through playing the game and make up your own team. You have to think about deeper kind of levels of data like chemistry. Can these players play together? You have to think about an Italian guy won't play well against a Spanish guy, maybe. That will create a problem in your chemistry. Then you have to think about certain player attributes. Do I want a speedy player on the right side? How do I look at my defense strategy? There's a lot of depth that goes into Ultimate Team. That's why it's so successful. It's also how easy it is to interact with Ultimate Team.
We have to be very careful how we craft the UI on the console and how people can buy, trade, and manage their teams. They can also do it on the app on the phone. When they're on the bus or when they're away from their game, people trade and buy and manage their squads on the run. This has proved to be a significant driver for engagement and, frankly, monetization as well. One interesting fact, right now in FIFA Ultimate Team, there are about 2 million trades happening just now. There's 2 million trades happening almost every second inside the FIFA Ultimate Team business, which is a staggering number if you think about it. For us, this will represent a big option or opportunity as we look into competitive gaming, which Peter Moore will come up and talk to me about after I'm done.
Battlefield and the live services that we've done here. Battlefield, we started doing a deeper live service layer with Battlefield 3. We launched something called Battlefield Premium. Again, we, at the time, didn't think that we had an Ultimate Team mechanic that worked for Battlefield. We had to come up with a different strategy on how to keep players engaged and feeding them more content. We do this in the form of expansion packs, which is maps, weapons, vehicles, and other things that we think the players want. We also do this through a microtransaction layer where you can actually buy what we call Battlepacks, which is basically a way for you to buy the things that you are missing that you haven't unlocked in your progression through the game.
There are other things that we also can do, such as to keep people engaged, we create something called the Community Test Environment. What this is it's a way where the players, the really hardcore players, get to take part in a community, a community that helps us design the game and change it as we go. We are in constant communication with these players. There are thousands of them. They will feedback and test things in development. It's like a secluded layer where they partake. We will get proper feedback not only from our QA teams but from real players out there on a continuous basis to whether the things that we're doing with the game are the right ones or not.
We maybe even go so far to take it to the community designing maps that then make it into the game. It's like a controlled user-generated content place, which has been really important for us and been very successful. I also want to touch briefly on a subject that's dear to my heart, what makes a great game? If we strive to be the world's greatest game company, we have to make the world's greatest games. It's that simple. I'd like to give you guys an insight into how I look at it and how we look at it inside the studio organization. First and foremost, this is not easy to define. Quality is sometimes subjective. It's something that you may think you've done something that you believe will be the right thing, then it's proven to be the wrong thing.
You sometimes think that you've made a mistake that proved to be the right thing. Again, this is not easy to define. For me, games are art. Games are entertainment. They're art. We have to dare to take creative risks, to push boundaries, and challenge conventions as we go after games that we make. Games are also science. You have hundreds of people working on a game. Maybe less creative things like scheduling, development process, become really important in how we make a game. We talked briefly about technology, also a big part. The most important aspect of a game team are actually the people. For us to have the best possible people, to make sure that they're motivated and that they know what we expect of them, is key.
All these three factors play in when you want to make a high-quality product. We all have maybe you guys do. I spent a lot of my life Googling and looking for Metacritic, which is like an aggregation site of review scores that tell us how we're doing. This is a way for us to be measured and publicly to see did what we do make sense. I wouldn't say that Metacritic is the only factor that we look at. It's one of many that we look at. Over the past six months or so, we've tried to define a process and a framework to better help us identify and understand what makes a great game. The way I look at it is craftsmanship is the number one part. What is craftsmanship? Craftsmanship means what fidelity? How are the controls?
Is the game done right? Does it have the right depth? Does it have all those things that are important to the craftsmanship of making a game? Is the audio correct? How are the animations, those things? The depth and breadth is something that is proving to be more and more important. In a world where we want $60 upfront and where we expect people to stay with us over the course of a long time, the depth of what we offer is important. We've actually had some dialogue. Star Wars Battlefront came out. It totally nailed a lot of these factors out here. We got criticized for the depth and breadth of it. As we look at why that was, we have to go back and course-correct that for another version if we are ever to build one, Blake.
The differentiation, again, push the boundaries of what gaming means. We can't be making the same game over and over again. We have to push our teams to come up with new ideas, to dare to innovate, to dare to be different. If you look back at the Battlefield 1 trailer, that's one way of differentiating what you're doing. Mirror's Edge, the whole game is a large differentiation. It's a first-person game based on movement where you can't shoot people. That is one way. Again, you have to take creative risks to be successful. Service and stability, something that you guys know very well, is important. We've had tremendous success this year with a lot of stable launches.
That I actually credit to the game teams, but probably more so to Ken Moss, our CTO, and the work that the CTO organization has done in making sure that we are buttoned up and that we know what we're doing when we launch a game. This is incredibly important. These are the things that we look at. They help us make the right decisions at the right time. If you go into a review with a game team that's presenting you with a game pitch, you can actually look at the framework. You can start asking questions around the things that are up here. Not only does it help the developers in EA, but it also helps the executives and the people that are looking at what's being built to make the right decisions.
What's important for us is to test many things but to also kill many things and to pick the ones that make sense and keep of those. Leveraging our scale is something that I believe is an incredible advantage for us. With 4,100 people inside of studios, with an equally large part of the rest of the company helping us, I believe that scale is an incredible advantage. If you think about how we are collaborating not only within studios but across studios, that remains something that, I would be honest, we maybe haven't done greatly in the first years when I came here, 10, 15 years ago. We're doing a lot better now.
If you think about the FIFA team today working with BioWare, there's a collaboration with them, you have actually developers from BioWare who makes RPG games, Mass Effect: Dragon Age, working on FIFA today. When teams are done with a game and they kind of ramp down, instead of them working on things that may or may not make sense at the time, we actually put them on other games. The developers love this. For the BioWare guys to work on FIFA for a while is interesting for them. It's creatively challenging for them. This is something that we do across the world all the time with all our teams. Another part of scale is obviously our central content team. We have about 800 people in low-cost locations that actually create the majority of all the art seen in all our games.
This gives us a flexible workforce. It can decrease the studio sizes that we have by, instead of having every single studio staff up to have a full art team on site, we can actually have one large art team that can scale up and down between projects, much more efficient, and actually is now driving higher quality and more consistent quality across our games. Motion capture is another thing that is super important to how you make games today. Before, a lot of the animations that were made were handmade. Today, almost all of it is done in motion capture. You put a suit on. You have a bunch of cameras. The cameras will register what you do. Then we can transfer the movements into the games in the form of game animations. We have a large facility in Vancouver.
We've actually even more motion captured horses as seen in the Battlefield trailer. Obviously, we have smaller locations around the world for teams to do more simple things. This is also an incredibly important part of our organization. Test and quality may be not as sexy as motion capture or making games. Again, going back to the stability part, a very important section. This is an area that's actually developing more than one would think today, again, through the work with EADP that Ken Moss runs. We're seeing progress made in automated testing.
Testing that usually were done by humans can now be done, to some extent, by machines, which can do it faster, will find other types of problems, and again, helps us leverage our scale and give us a greater economy so that humans can focus on more sophisticated testing and actually give qualitative feedback. The machines can focus on, does it run the way it should? Frostbite, again, something that Andrew spoke about briefly. When I joined the company, there were 16 engines in development around the company. I started the Frostbite initiative probably 10, 12 years ago. I started it for the reason that Andrew mentioned. Whenever we made a game, we also made a game engine.
That doesn't sound particularly economically savvy, nor is it particularly fun because you get to spend 70% of your time building a game engine and 30% of your time building a game. We would like to spend 90% of our time building a game and 10% working on an engine. Quickly, what is the game engine? Well, the game engine is actually the framework and the technical platform that we use to build the games. It's also the technical platform that actually runs the games. When you turn a game on, you start our game engine. The things that are inside of the game engine are what you play. We're going to show a short video to get you some insight to what Frostbite is and how we can use it. If we can please run the Frostbite video.
Our journey to get to one engine is almost complete. This year, you'll see us move more games onto Frostbite. More on that at EA Play in June. Going back to leveraging our scale with Frostbite, here's a couple of tech examples that show you why one engine is important. On the right-hand side, you are seeing something that is not so maybe easy to understand. It's actually a crowd technology. That was developed for PGA, the golf game. Essentially, after that, was adopted by the Mass Effect team to have big crowds that you walk through. That was then adopted by the Mirror's Edge team to have a large crowd layer on the street level that you go that is now being adapted by other game teams.
Instead of every game team having to build a crowd technique or technology for themselves, all teams can use one set of crowd technology. On the far left, you're seeing a character from Mirror's Edge that is using a multitude of technologies to look that way. It's how you render the character on screen, everything from the hair technology. Yes, we have a team working on hair technology. How is hair depicted in the game? Does it move accurately when you move around? How is wind affecting hair? All these things are factors that we have to think about. If you do that again in one set of tools, you can then share it across all the games instead of having to build it specifically for one game.
You can't underestimate the value of one engine and what it means for the developers out there and what it means for EA. Almost done. Again, in the spirit of valued shared technology across the company, this is not something that happens in EA Studios in isolation. There's a great collaboration with EA, the EADP team, which is the CTO organization. Even with marketing, the data analytics layer and other parts of EA does this. Collaboration is key to success. With these components at scale, we can drive disproportionate growth, to be honest, very important. Looking into the future, for those of you who know me, I'm a big believer in the need to constantly push and constantly innovate and to try and be better. I've had a lot of questions in the studio organization but also across EA.
We've had a dialogue around innovation and who gets to innovate. What I've told everyone inside the studio system, innovation is not something that you have to ask permission to do. This is something that has to be in our DNA. It's something that should be engraved in the culture of the company. We don't have an innovation squad running around inside the company innovating. This happens at a team level. It happens at a tech level. It actually happens even at the executive level, which I think is profound and very important from a company perspective.
With that to say, though, we have created something that we call EA Labs, which is or Frostbite Labs, which is a set of very talented people that are working on longer-term things that I believe could be profound for the industry and for the company. Here's a couple of examples of what they're working on. They're today in Stockholm. We have a cell in Vancouver, selected few, maybe 30, 40 people, so not that many, but highly specialized, highly talented that are working on things that are kind of out there. They have a project on virtual humans. When virtual reality becomes important to us, which I think it will be, how you're seen as a virtual human in that world is something that we need to solve for.
For us to make believable characters becomes more and more important as we drive innovation on the narrative and character part. The question becomes, if you want to create a virtual human, how does a virtual interactive human function and look like? This is the stuff that they're working on, the kind of out there long term. You guys have probably heard about deep learning and what other companies are talking about. This is kind of a new trend in technology. deep learning is something that we're using today to drive maybe unexpected things like, what can we do with deep learning and neural networks to build up procedurally generated content? Imagine a world where a creator comes to work.
Instead of having to, A, work with a conceptual artist to build a level and figure out whether it's winter, whether it's nighttime, he can go into the Frostbite editor and apply certain attributes. I want the level to be at winter. I want it to be located in this location. I want a certain level of attributes. Essentially push a button. Out comes a level. We will never get to a point where the level is then just taken from there, put into a game, and shipped. That won't happen.
If we can get a base set of levels created that the artist can then go in, the level designers can go in, and alterate, imagine just how much time we've won and how much more time we can spend on iterating on the game instead of actually making the game, which in sense should drive economy of scale and should also drive a better product. I think it's important to stay relevant. We need to dare to look into the future and dare to go deep into the kind of crazy corners of technology. It's our responsibility as a company. It's something that I'm passionate about and something that I think we have the right people to do. What I want you to take away from what I've said, I think that we have an unmatched and powerful IP portfolio.
I believe that games as a service is nothing new. I gave you multiple examples. So did Andrew of how it's transforming our company. On our path to become 100% digital company, this is probably the single most important component. We have a well-defined development process for how we make our games and how we make them great. I believe that everyone in the industry, in particular companies in the valley here, are looking for the next amazing thing. I'm actually thrilled about the progress that we're making towards our next big thing. I've been in this industry for more than 20 years. I think this sums up what I think we need to do to be successful, to continue to grow and lead this industry long term as well as short term. Thank you for everyone for listening.
I hope you enjoy the talk. Up next is Peter Moore to talk about competitive gaming.
Thank you, Patrick. As a company that relies on creative talent, we are so fortunate to have somebody of that level leading our development studios around the world. I've been in this industry a number of times throughout the years with Sega and Microsoft, now with EA. I have never met anybody that has the depth and scale and passion and determination for success as Patrick Söderlund. We're incredibly fortunate to have him. Let's talk about competitive gaming. From the perspective of what we are looking at in Electronic Arts, of course, we're looking for growth. Andrew touched on this with more platforms, new business models, and deeper engagement, which becomes the key for us.
What I'm going to take you through, about a 20-minute presentation, is our view of what we see with competitive gaming, which might be a little different than you're hearing in the marketplace right now. Why EA is uniquely positioned to be able to take full advantage of what we see as the future of engagement at a deep level. Both Patrick and Andrew talked about live services, about our games being truly 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. What I'm going to take you through is a little bit of a whistle-stop tour of what that means and how we apply our competitive gaming elements to our games to drive deeper engagement, to be able to have more gamers, play more games, have more fun, and ultimately to be able to monetize at a very effective level.
Let's start off with, as our safe harbor, let's start off with a quick video and give you a taste of esports. Play that video, please.
Hearing the cheers of 40,000 people echo throughout a World Cup stadium made it clear that gaming was finally getting its Woodstock moment.
There's about 18,000 people in the stadium live. Then 32 million watched the final. This is what kids are doing. This is what people want to see.
Esports has kind of taken over. It's become a sporting event.
All I do is win, win no matter what. Got money on my mind. I can never get enough. Every time I step up in the building, everybody's hands go up. They say, "Damn." They say, "Yeah." They say, "Damn." 'Cause all I do is win, win. If you're going in, put your hands in the air. Make them say, "Damn.
Ludacris going in on the verse 'cause I've never been defeated. I won't stop now. Keep your hands up. Get them in the sky for the homies that ain't making it. My folk locked down. I never went nowhere. What they saying? Ludacris back. Blame it on that con tool. The hood call it Ludacris. I'm on this foolish track. I spit my foolish flow. All I do is win, win no matter what. Got money on my mind. I can never get enough. Every time I step up in the building, everybody's hands go up. They say, "Damn." They say, "Yeah." They say, "Damn." All I do is win, win. If you're going in, put your hands in the air. Make them say, "Damn.
That's esports, exciting, big arenas, and yet expensive and aspirational for millions, if not hundreds of millions of people. What it's not is competitive gaming. The focus of esports at the top end is on a few hundred gamers, all of whom are professional in some level or another, either getting through prize money or their subscriptions on their YouTube channels. An exciting part of the business. We will take full advantage of that at Electronic Arts. Our ability through our Global Media Solutions team to be able to do these sponsorship deals is huge. I have a 50-person team based out of Los Angeles, based out of Chicago, New York City, and here in San Francisco that for many years has been doing sponsorship and advertising sales and is absolutely chomping at the bit to take advantage of the excitement you see there.
Let's think about where we're really at. That's what we're talking about in esports. Let's look at competitive gaming because the pyramid you see here tells the real story of where the opportunity is for a company like EA, for what the structure of esports, i.e., competitive gaming, truly is, and where we can really bring value both to the players as well as to our shareholders in being able to drive extra engagement, to drive extra monetization. Let's start at the bottom of the pyramid, what we call competition-oriented game experience. There are 60 to 70 millions of [Alex Citrons] in this world playing a League of Legends or a Dota 2 or Counter-Strike Go or a Battlefield or a FIFA or a Madden NFL. They play because they aspire to be in that arena that we showed in the video.
They aspire to move up the pyramid to play better, to have more interaction with their friends, ultimately maybe win some money or certainly win from a motivational perspective the type of elements that make gamers really feel part of our industry. Secondarily, we move up. We've got community-run online events. Here's a photograph, actually Super Smash Bros., dorm rooms around the world, bedrooms around the world, six or eight guys or gals getting together and playing like LAN parties of old, a very important part. As we move up the pyramid, this is where the value chain starts to kick in. Third part. Now it gets really exciting from a scale perspective. Photograph Santa Clara University. Again, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 people arriving for a weekend, paying entry fees, paying for prize money.
In the back of the area there, you can see watching the best players and learning from those best players. We think there are millions of these types of events now being formulated over the years that will be able to drive towards the top of the pyramid, which is now we start thinking about studio events. This is a photograph from Gfinity Studio above the Fulham Road tube station in London, built for TV, 200, 250 people streaming through Twitch, on demand through YouTube, and certainly with broadcast partners now getting involved, a huge opportunity for us to be able to drive the media rights we talked about. Let me just talk about that a little bit, though, because when we get to the top, yes, this is exciting.
As Andrew pointed out, you've got companies like Reebok coming and sponsoring UFC, huge media property, but it's $70 million over 10 years. My prior life, I was Senior Vice President of global sports marketing for Reebok, very inverted and involved and embedded in doing these deals, complex, decent money, but not what we as a company were doing it for because we were doing it to sell shoes. In the same way that we will get involved in Electronic Arts in sponsorship and marketing and ad sales, we're doing that to be aspirational, to be able to drive the rest of the pyramid forward. We have a vision, make stars of all of our players, not just the top. Everybody wants to be a Messi. Everybody wants to be idolized on a global basis.
For the world that I grew up in, kicking a ball around in Liverpool, I was going to play for Liverpool. No, I wasn't. Did I spend money on footballs and boots and programs and newspapers and magazines and going to the game itself? You bet I did, as did millions of other aspiring young footballers that wanted to play at that top of the pyramid. For every Messi, there are tens of millions of boys and girls around the world kicking a ball around. The global economy of a sport like soccer is huge. That's really where the action is. The real reason Nike puts the swoosh on Messi is so that they can put swooshes on these kids and sell against that. That's what it's at, becomes aspirational. The esports at the top of the pyramid is aspirational. It's expensive.
Where the real value we see, particularly when you think about our games, the Ultimate Teams, Battlepacks in Battlefield, our games are built to monetize at a mass market level. The more engagement we get, the more monetization opportunities we drive. Four real goals for the competitive gaming division, very simple, increase session days for all of our gamers globally. A session day is defined by the fact that you log in and you go play a game on a particular day. Our data analytics team will tell us that for every session day extra that we drive on an incremental basis, we have the opportunity to monetize that gamer between $5 and $10 incrementally versus what they would generally spend. Secondly, increase engagement at a game. We like to talk about the Super Bowl being a huge media platform.
Well, the Super Bowl is about four and a half hour broadcast, of which there's about 20 minutes of actual action. When you think about the shoulder programming, as we call it, that leads up to the Super Bowl, those two weeks, that's as much worth the money as it is in the actual event itself. Driving user-generated content, driving programming, making heroes out of all of our players gives us a huge opportunity to build a bigger platform so that our consumers become engaged, not just when they're playing, but finding out about the game. The 30-odd million that Patrick talked about for the Battlefield 1 trailer, huge, right? Content that we can drive to shoulder around the actual event itself is monetizable. It's engaging and drives players to play the game deeper. Thirdly, increase acquisition of new players into our games.
It is irrefutable that if you drive competitive gaming modes big and hard into games itself, more players want to play. They see it as more fun. They love the competition. They see the opportunity to be aspirational to drive their way up the pyramid. We will sell more copies of the games, whether it's a FIFA, whether it's a Madden NFL, whether it's a Battlefield. At EA Play, you're going to see the opportunity for other franchises from an esports competition. What both Andrew and Patrick put up there with our brand portfolio gives us six to eight games that I think have the potential to be competitive gaming games going forward here, all built with competitive gaming modes in there and all built with the opportunity to monetize deeper.
Finally, increase NPS of our brands, NPS, Net Promoter Score, very simple, question we ask millions of gamers every day, on a scale from 0 to 10, would you recommend this game to our friend? Patrick talks about Metacritic. We also look at NPS as being a real indicator of the quality of our game. We do it daily. It goes up and down and ebbs and flows. As we bring more content in and as we bring more modes in, we find our Net Promoter Score of our games grow. If you have a better Net Promoter Score, you have a better opportunity to retain that customer to the next iteration of the game. Putting competitive gaming in there will drive up the NPS. Again, that allows us to retain our customer.
We're engaging them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. When the next Battlefield or the next Need for Speed or the next UFC or FIFA or Madden NFL come along, it's so much easier and cost-effective to move them on. Two ways to engage. This is very simple. First of all, playing itself, make competitive gaming meaningful no matter your skill level. There is nothing more frustrating than going on and playing in an online event and getting your ass kicked by a 12-year-old and having to go back and get kicked out of the tournament and feeling embarrassed about that. One of the keys that we're working on as part of our platform team led by Ken Moss, our CTO, two things, matchmaking becomes critical. There is no fun whatsoever being completely destroyed every time you go online.
We've all done it. The ability for us to find the right people as a player becomes critical to on time and online and increased engagement. If we don't get our matchmaking right, then the frustration level goes high and people churn out of the game. Secondarily, to entertain and teach. We found now, we talk a lot in the entertainment world, there's only 24 hours a day. The ability for us to be able, when you look at the spectating element, whether it's through a streaming partner, whether it's through our own platforms, to find entertainment through watching people play video games, 130 million people do last month via Twitch and YouTube and our channels and channels around the world that focus on competitive gaming, they love to watch, they love to learn, that pushes them back up to actually being a player.
Three-year plan, top line for us, very simple, focused franchise participation. Under a dedicated leader in myself, I've got a team that we're building now, an absolute standalone division that is both a vertical silo but takes advantage of the 8,400 people that Andrew talked to that are EA employees who all are chomping at the bit to get going with competitive gaming, building competitive gaming features and our platform out. We're not in denial as the work we need to do. We have incredible brands, but to be able to leverage those brands, we've got to build our modes in. Our studios around the world are doing that right now. Thirdly, established partnerships. It's a fragmented industry if you've followed it, the ESLs of this world, the FACEITs of this world, the Gfinitys of this world.
We have met with just about every major player in competitive gaming around the world, forming partnerships, looking at platforms, looking at companies that can execute against marketing in support of us, looking at our geographies around the world, engaging with our local offices to make sure we've got a cohesive global program that we roll out at the end of this fiscal year and going forward. As we move into FY 2018, we start scaling our audience. Very important that we build scale, A, because you want to build a massive community that you can take advantage of and provide more fun and entertainment to, B, obviously, from a monetization level, as we start thinking about kicking our sponsorship and media rights sales into full gear, you need the eyeballs. Secondarily, select additional franchises.
Again, I can see a world where we've got between six and eight franchises going down the line that have competitive gaming tournaments that allow us to be able to drive towards prize money. Again, that will increase engagement. That increases monetization. Thirdly, what we call white label capabilities. If we look at the middle of that pyramid, the ability for EA to come in and help organize through white labeling of tournaments, providing those folks right now to walk around with a clipboard and a pen and say, "Did you win? Did you lose?" to build the tournament ladder. We're working on tools that we can apply so that we make that more seamless, that brings EA closer to the action there in the middle of the pyramid, ultimately drives up the pyramid, drives up the value chain.
As we move into FY19, we are seeing players compete, spectate, and share. That's very important. There's a platform capability required there for us to be able to share the content. Again, the platform team is driving towards that. We are only 24 months away here. That's when you get to large-scale audiences in the tens, if not hundreds of millions. That's when you are driving true engagement. That's when you are driving real media. As we move forward, we think about our franchises and particularly the sports franchises tying in to the real world. As we think about World Cups and European Championships and Super Bowls and NBA Championships, you can see how we can definitely do that. Pay to spectate.
We also see a world where subscription channels become part of the business model and the ability for us to be able to drive content that people actually pay on a sufficient basis to watch so that they do spectate and learn, and ultimately, they actually then start playing the game. A lot of talk about where the money is in competitive gaming. This is how we see it. Our good friends at Newzoo, in comparison and collaboration with our own internal estimates, see that this is how the pie chart breaks out. Our focus is pretty simple. It's within Pac-Man there. As you come back, you can see where the money is in microtransaction lift, full game sales, and then competitive gaming crowding, microtransactions, and crowdfunding towards prize money. From that perspective, our focus is here. Yes, is there ad revenue right now? Absolutely.
Are there sponsorships available that will drive media rights, that will drive engagement? You bet. Our real focus right now is getting our games right for competitive gaming and building the modes and taking advantage of the dark blue areas. That's FY17 and into FY18. As we get further down the line between FY18 and FY19, you can see how we can move more aggressively into what remains as the value chain that is competitive gaming. Bottom line, EA, incredibly well positioned because of the breadth of our franchises, building out a competitive gaming standalone division, taking full advantage of its Global Media Solutions group, building out engagement models that, to Andrew's point, could double our Ultimate Team revenues of $694 million, which will be margin-rich digital revenue that flows to the bottom line.
Not only that, acquisition of more customers, players that come in buy more copies of the game. The regular net revenue we see with extra copies of the game also flows down to the bottom line as well. Early days, excited about what we are doing, excited about the progress we have made so far. Again, we take a slightly different look where we look at a mass market level of how we can bring value to competitive gamers. Going forward here, we think there's a huge opportunity both for the industry and, more importantly, for EA's bottom line. Thank you.
All right, we'll break now for 15 minutes, and we'll be back at 10:00 exactly when Samantha will talk us through her mobile business. Thank you. Thank you. If everyone could take their seats. There must be a place where you can buy those little xylophones with just three notes for exactly this purpose. I don't know if they have any other reason for existence outside of this. Amazon. Amazon has everything. Right. I think we'll get going then. Thank you. I'm going to introduce Samantha Ryan now, who's going to talk you through our mobile business. Thank you. Let's talk about mobile. We are going to start by talking a little bit about the evolution of mobile, which has been pretty crazy over the past few years. We will move into live services.
We'll show you some of our games, come back and talk about advertising, as well as what is happening in the future. One constant to mobile for the past few years, and that is rapid, unprecedented growth. Growth in new territories, growth on new devices, and growth, most importantly, in new players, bringing in new generations, folks that had never played a game before, into our ecosystem. You cannot have this kind of unprecedented and rapid growth without evolution. Evolution is hard. Evolution is messy. I've been a developer for 20 years. Evolution is something you really have to embrace. Let's take a look at what this has looked like over the past few years. We're going to pick a point in time. That point in time is Christmas, for three very pivotal years in our business.
Let's see what we can learn by digging into the past. We can see, first of all, that there's been a big shift we're all familiar with of the business model. Literally, in three years, the entire business model of mobile changed from premium to free-to-play. You can see that over the course of three years. There's been other, more subtle shifts that are really interesting to think about. That is the rise of winning formulas. If you think about 2010 and 2011, you see a lot of sort of strange games on there, experimental efforts, not a lot of standardized genres. As you move to 2012 is pivotal because it's really the first year in mobile that you start to see the rise of the modern genres. You start to see match-three.
You start to see strategy, casino, even things like Rage of Bahamut. Who would have thought back in the day? That was actually a precursor to the RPG genre, which is huge in both the East and the West. If we extrapolate this further and we look at the evolution, let's look at 2015. Here are the top 20 titles from Christmas of just a few months ago, 2015. You can see EA has three titles in the top 20 with Star Wars, Madden, and The Sims. What's more interesting is to dig into the background of these titles and figure out what kind of trends can we really learn that are going on in the mobile marketplace. There's three really important trends that we can look at. The first is the right game. What is the right game?
There's some really key elements that all of the games at the top of the chart share, that you really can't overlook. They have a lot of social play. We're inherently social beings. We like to collaborate. We like to compete. We like depth, and we're going to talk more about this in a little bit. Innovation has become increasingly more and more important. The next piece of the formula is that you have to be able to execute at scale. You need technology. You need analytics. You need these things to be supported across millions of people. Finally, acquiring users is incredibly hard. There are thousands of mobile games that are launching each year.
My publishing group has given me some data, they tell me that to be featured above the fold, which is sometimes key to success or failure, that means at the top of the app store on either Google or iOS, your chances of getting featuring are less than 1%. That is a make or break for many people. User acquisition, acquiring people into the top of the funnel, is really hard. We're going to talk more about that as well. Let's take those learnings and compare them on a couple of case studies that reveal some important trends that are going on in today's marketplace. Here's two excellent games. Marvel Contest of Champions and a game put out by a small independent, Stormborn, both released around the same time. Both excellent, very high-quality games.
Contest of Champions, sub-elements that we just talked about, they're pretty much hitting on all cylinders, they're doing very well. Here is the challenge for the smaller developer these days. Sure, they have a great game, they simply do not have the scale, the technology, the network, the ability to do player acquisition. They just simply cannot break through. That's why all of these elements are so crucial to today's success. This is why you're seeing real consolidation in these markets, because a lot of these elements are extremely expensive, time-consuming, they take a depth of talent that a lot of people simply can't afford. There's another really important trend that's going on, that is that gamers are becoming incredibly sophisticated.
If you think about the console market and how it evolved over many, many years, we started with fairly simplistic games, such as Pac-Man, we've evolved to incredibly sophisticated games, such as Battlefield 1. Same thing is happening in the mobile market. Our gamers want more depth, here are three different games that look very different from each other, they all offer very deep strategic choices. If you cannot provide this strategic choice to players, it is increasingly difficult to keep them engaged over the long term. They may come in as a blip, but you can't get them to stay. Let's take a look at our own games and give you a little bit of a case study on Madden. I'd like to introduce Mr. Dan Box, who is the general manager of our mobile sports business.
He's going to walk you through Madden, show you some gameplay elements, and talk about why this formula works.
Thank you.
Yep.
Thanks, Samantha. Wow. We had another great year with Madden Mobile. We had millions and millions of new fans coming into the game for the first time and coming into the franchise for the first time, firmly positioning Madden Mobile as America's favorite sports video game. Before we get into too much detail, I'm going to kick off this presentation with a short video that includes some of the highlights from the game for the last year. A great year with a lot of learnings about what it takes to build a great sports game.
We're taking those learnings and creating a framework for how we think not just about Madden for the year coming up, but also, importantly, how we think about all of our sports mobile games for the year ahead, which is incredibly important for us because we have a number of very important releases in sports mobile over the next year. We have NBA Live already in soft launch, doing very, very well at the moment, and we have a big release for FIFA planned for later in the year. I'm going to take you through what I believe to be four key drivers behind Madden's success, starting first with designing gameplay to fit into the life of a mobile gamer. What I mean by that is mobile gamers play differently. They often, and on average, play more sessions per day, but those sessions are shorter than HD.
One of our goals with Madden, with the new version of Madden, was to build a fun gameplay experience that could be enjoyed within 30 seconds. It's that objective that led us to what I believe is one of the key product innovations on Madden, which was taking the AAA quality gameplay directly from Madden HD and building a mode called Live Events. Live Events is short, fun gameplay that can be completed by our players within 30 seconds, earning them a reward each time they play. If we look at Live Events in the game, we start with a map, which is the home screen of the game. Multiple Live Events are added each and every day, so every time you come in, it's different. Different types of Live Events. This one is a passing, a touchdown challenge where I've selected running as my strategy.
You can see I've been successful there. Here we have a passing drill where I, as the player, have to run through a number of zones and turn to complete that pass. Finally, there's a different version where there's a running drill where I evade the opposition as well as the obstacles to get to the end to complete the touchdown. Really simple gameplay, but super fun and hugely addictive. A lot of variation. Importantly, when you complete these events, you get a number of rewards. You get immediate positive feedback. You use those rewards to continue to build your team, which is one of the more long-term strategic goals around the game. The second point is just that, goals. It's important for us to create clear and meaningful goals for our players when they play our mobile games.
That gives us the best possible chance of keeping them in the game for as long as we can. For a goal to be meaningful for a mobile gamer, it first must be based on gameplay that has enough depth. Secondly, it must give our players strategic choices along the way. Finally, we must give them a reward at the end of that gameplay that they view to be valuable and then a use of their time. If we look here, I'll show you how our Ultimate Team mechanic is the best framework for us to establish those goals with our players. We'll go into team management. We'll look at my team based on the roster of players I have. If I want more players, I can get them from packs. I own packs either by playing the game or purchasing them.
If I get good players in my packs, I can update my team by clicking that button. I have two choices. I can manage my team on an individual player. If I'm a hardcore user or I know the sport, I can pick which players I like. If I'm more casual, I can hit that Best Lineup button, top right, and it automatically creates the best formation with the players that I have. That's a super simple feature but incredibly important because the last two years have seen us welcome in millions of more casual fans into Madden than we've ever seen before. A lot of those casual fans are from a younger demographic. The simplicity of what you just saw is a very important enabler.
Thirdly, I'd like to talk about how every day we add new, live, fresh content into the game, giving all of our players a reason to come back. Not just live content every day, but every month, we're also creating bigger campaigns with stories attached to them. We link all the game modes in the game and all the content we're putting into the game into those stories, and we give them a theme as a wrapper. We can link those campaigns to not just events that are happening in the NFL, like the Super Bowl or the draft, but we can also link them to events that are happening in the real world, things like Halloween, Thanksgiving, Easter, Christmas.
The beauty of that is it gives us a platform to engage and connect with our players all year round and not just in the 120 days of the NFL season. Let me show you quickly how we presented the draft recently in the game. As soon as you come in, it looks and feels different. It's branded for the draft. The message of the day that pops up directs you to draft-related content or Live Events. The important thing is everything that you touch as a player is branded draft. If you go into Live Events, there'll be draft-branded Live Events. Ideally, the concept of the Live Event will link to the draft in some shape or form. Like normally playing the game, I go for quite an ambitious, long pass here, by the way, but I've ensured that I'm successful.
You play the Live Event. You earn the reward as you do throughout the game. The beauty of this is the rewards contribute to sets that you can collect, keeping people coming back, draft-branded again, and ideally giving me ultimate rewards, which is players and collectibles as well as players. Those players, as you know, come in the form of a pack. As with every campaign, we brand that pack consistently with the campaign, so in this instance, draft. This is where it gets really fun. The content in these packs, in particular the players, are players who were drafted only hours before on live television, and they're in the pack in the new team that they've been drafted onto. This is the first interaction that anybody gets playing with the players that have just moved onto their new team.
This is live service 2.0, in my opinion. This is the area that I believe personally that we can't be matched by anybody else. Finally, I wanted to really quickly touch on social and how our social features in Madden Mobile are driving record engagement and record spend amongst our players. Really quickly, the social feature set in Madden allows our players to either play cooperatively within a League that they join or play competitively with their League against other Leagues. We know that players who interact with the social mode, which is called Leagues, spend more sessions in the game every single day, and those sessions run longer than an average user. We also know that that increased engagement drives improved conversion to spend, which is important, and also an increased volume of spend per spender.
Finally, we know that our social feature set in the game had about a 600% increase in interaction amongst our player base, which can be tied directly to the continued growth of Madden Mobile. So it's really, really important and something that we think a lot about when we think about the game. So really quickly, if we look at the Leagues mode within the game, which is the core social feature, this is my league. I'm part of the Pirates League. I can see all the other leagues that we have active competitions against. If I click on one, I can see that tournament that I'm currently participating in, how I'm performing, how our team is performing. I can jump in there. I can chat. I can speak to my team members.
I can maybe be a bit of banter with the guys that I'm competing against, how I'm going to kick their butt. Then I can pick the three players that I want to compete against in that tournament. Ideally, we then get into gameplay, and I can have the chance for another win in Madden Mobile, which gives me the ultimate bragging rights for another victory in the game. That's how social works. So that's it. That's a really quick run-through of the learnings that we've taken away from the last two years of Madden and how they're going to help us deliver our strategy for this year around replicating the success of Madden but across multiple sports games. When those games are combined, it gives us a huge global reach of potential players. Thank you.
The real beauty of Electronic Arts is that we have a very large portfolio. So we can take learnings from the industry. We can take learnings from our own games, and we can apply that across a very wide breadth of services that can run for many, many years, four, five, six, who knows how long some of these games will last. The way we look at running a live service is we are on call 365 days a year for our players. They are important. We manage them. We look at them through the lens of acquisition, engagement, and monetization. Acquisition is what drives installs. There's really three ways that we look at how we acquire people. The first is through paid acquisition, performance-based marketing through Facebook or Twitter or other mechanisms that we can track and understand what our players are doing.
The second is that we have great partnerships with Google, Apple, and others, so we can earn acquisition. We can get features or special promotions. Finally, we have the benefit of a very large player network. So we can push gamers or prompt them to go from one game to another. Perhaps they're tired of one game, and we may be able to offer them another game so that they can stay in the family. When we think about a live service, it is an ongoing flow of content. Here's an example from SimCity over the past 12 months. You can see that there are many large releases in addition to small daily and weekly events and other elements that we bring to our players. We can track how these events are driving our installs over time, which means that we can tune what we're doing.
When we tune what we're doing, this has an impact on monetization. For example, here is the last few months of SimCity. We recently added an event called Contest of Mayors, which is a new social feature for SimCity where players can compete and collaborate to have the best city. You can see once we launched Contest of Mayors, we have had a spike in our monetization. Every single piece of content that we release, we can track. We can understand what players are responding to, and we can give them more of what they desire and less of what they don't desire. Let's take a deep dive now into our very successful Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes.
I'd like to introduce you to John Celera, who heads our team over at Capital Games in Sacramento, and show you what has been going on there on the live service front.
Great. Thank you, Samantha. Good morning, everyone. Since Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes launched 6 months ago, it has become one of the highest-rated and highest-grossing titles on both Android and iOS. A key reason we have been this successful is because we keep the game fresh and exciting for our players through our live services. That's what I'm going to talk about today. Before I get into it, in case you're unfamiliar with the title, I'll show you a brief trailer and give you a high-level description. Galaxy of Heroes takes place in a cantina far, far away. Through the hollow table, players are able to collect, battle, and upgrade characters from all the films and all the TV shows. The game features classic, strategic, turn-based combat and enables both solo play as well as combat alongside and against players from around the world.
Here's the cantina. This is what the players see when they first start up the game. This gives them access to all aspects of the game. This is considered the steady state. The live services kind of fit on top of that. They grow the experience. When I talk about that, we're talking about new functionality, new characters, new packs, new promotions, new events, and new epic multiplayer battles called raids. I'm going to talk about some of those examples. Fundamentally, the game is about collecting characters and building the most powerful parties. In order to see their characters, the ones they own, the players click that button in the upper left, characters, to bring up their inventory. I know this looks maybe a bit daunting if you haven't played the game before, but players, as they progress in the game, learn the iconography here.
I'm going to go one click in and show you the character detail page to give you some sense of the depth of the game. Each character has four progression systems. That's level, rarity, gear, and abilities. The mix of these, along with a few other elements of the character, makes it so each character presents a unique strategic option for the player in and of themselves, but also how they fit into a party and what compositions they want to build. It's up to the player which way they want to go with the characters. When we look at this collection, right now, in the game when we launched, we had 64 characters. As of right now, we have 82. Actually, later today, we're launching another one, so we'll be at 83. We've got to keep that game alive for the players.
Each character we add adds new strategic possibilities, new party compositions, and new ways for them to play the game. Those are characters. We'll talk about events. Events are special, time-limited experiences, and we've run a bunch of those. Here's an example we ran back in April. This was a charitable event we ran, which benefited the World Wildlife Fund and featured Ewoks. To access this, players came over to the events table there, tapped on that, and found the right panel to jump into the event. The way this one worked is you could only bring Ewoks into battle. You either needed to have had them before the event started, or you could buy them in special packs that ran alongside the event.
One of the cool things that happened here, though, is that while Ewoks had been in the game really since launch, a lot of people weren't playing with them. Through this event, players have really rediscovered Ewoks. They're fun to play with. They have cool strategic options. They're cute and furry, and people are into them. This is one of the party compositions that a lot of people are chasing because they fit into other parts of the game in unique ways. Those are events. I've talked mostly about content, but let's talk about adding features and functionality. three weeks ago, we brought out our most successful update so far. We brought out guilds, and we brought out raids. The first raid features that big, ugly guy, a Rancor, and we'll see him again.
The way players access this is they scroll over to the left, they see this big red curtain, which has actually been in the game for a while, but that guild button wasn't there. We were hinting that something cool was coming. With the release, players can tap that and go behind the curtain into this kind of VIP room for their guild. What is a guild? Well, it's a collection that players form or a group that players form. They do that for various reasons. In part, it's just to meet up with other people and get to know them. It's also in order to access new features, new content, new rewards. There's a button down in the bottom, the chat button. If people want to communicate, they just tap on that.
We've had this whole text system for the guild. This is where they get to know each other, but also they share tips and tricks. Someone has a question about the game. Other players can help them. This is where they can also strategize around the main action right now, which is the raids. Raids are epic battles. What happens is the enemies in the raid that the guild is taking on share a massive and persistent health pool. Each member of the guild comes in and takes multiple parties and takes a whack at that raid and tries to fight it all the way down until it's fully defeated. These battles are pretty big and pretty epic. Just kind of put some scale on that.
Thought it'd be interesting to kind of flip it around and think about it from the Rancor's perspective. Here's the poor Rancor living in a cave. There's a guild coming at them that has up to 50 players. Each party has five characters. Each player gets five attempts per day. That means this poor Rancor is facing 1,250 characters per day from this one guild. It doesn't stop there because in the game, we have 60,000 active guilds. That means the Rancors in the game right now are facing millions of combatants each and every day. Here's an example. This is actually a raid that I participated in yesterday. You'll see we're making good progress. There are four phases there. We're in the last phase. We're down to the last little bit there.
I can see that there are three members of my guild, not me, that are actually at the top of the leaderboard. Why does the leaderboard matter? Well, depending on where you're placed and actually, I'm number 13 here at this point. Where you're placed in the leaderboard determines your prizes. There are chances at better gear, better loot, the higher up you are. Let's go into the raid and give you a quick example. This is a very accelerated look at the raid because these things can take hours, and they can even take days depending on the difficulty and also the strength of your guild. Because these are special experiences, we're able to put in nice little cinematic moments. As I mentioned, this is classic, turn-based combat. You'll see the health bars of the characters down at the bottom.
You'll see the massive one for the Rancor at the top. He's the one at 98% right now. Each character has different special abilities, and the player gets to choose which things they're going to take on. Something new we also added in this release is the ability to target objects. You see Greedo shooting that door. When he does that, the gate comes crashing down on the Rancor. Now the Rancor is effectively pinned and very vulnerable. This is a great time for the player to bring in as much damage as they can and really do their worst against the Rancor. Of course, the Rancor isn't going to sit there and take it the entire time. Eventually, he does shake off that gate, and now he's pretty upset. Now he'll go after the player's party with great ferocity.
His various attacks, one of my favorite is actually coming up right here where he basically has enough, and he picks up the character and eats them, and they're fully out of the battle. At the end of that attempt, all my guys are dead in that party, and I get a little read of all the damage that I did. Now you'll see I went from number 13 to number nine, and I still have four more attempts. I can keep working away at this raid. Basically, that's it. That's my time. I hope I've given you a sense of the ways in which we can continue to augment and improve this game that players and we are already loving. Thank you for your time.
We have another really important lever that we can pull as a part of our live services, and that's advertising. We believe that it's really important that we're respectful to our players and that we really understand what is bringing them into our game so we can present the right options at the right time. For example, if a player has very low engagement, they're not spending, it could frankly be that they wandered into the wrong game. Here we have an example of a The Sims FreePlay screenshot with a SimCity billboard. Perhaps they might enjoy SimCity better. We stick to pushing players to another game within our network if they're casual visitors. If they've proven themselves to be highly engaged, they're playing a lot, but they're not spending, this is where we believe there's a great opportunity for advertising.
What we can do is we can present them with beneficial reasons to watch those advertisements, such as to speed up timers or receive special content or something of the like, so that they can really receive something in exchange for their time. Finally, if they are highly engaged and they are perhaps spending a lot, we want to treat them very respectfully. We believe the right presentation mechanism is then things like VIP programs or concierge services or something like a special offer. We really try to tailor the different options depending on what our analytics tell us that our users want and how they're coming into the game. That's a look at how mobile has evolved, the different forces that are shaping what we're building today and how that's manifesting in some of our games and our live services.
What that brings us to, we believe, is a very robust year. We have a very strong portfolio of live services. In addition to that, we're layering on some new launches, which we are very excited about, in a nice variety of genres as well. From this, we also believe that this becomes the foundation for our future. When we think about our future, we believe we have a really nice formula for our future success. That starts by concentrating on some of the excellent brands that we have that are not being tapped currently in our live services. There's a lot of content, a lot of things that players love that we still haven't brought to them. We can add to that with something that is unique to EA, such as our large player network, as well as our ability to innovate.
Innovation is hard. Making quality is difficult. It takes people. It takes scale. We have a lot of depth of knowledge from our many, many, many years of history in the console space. We believe that we can really overdeliver in this space. Finally, scale and technology, which we also feel very strongly about, are required for us to succeed in the future. That's a little bit of a look on mobile, where we're going in the future. Thank you for your time.
Thank you, Samantha. I am up here and will be up here together with two of my colleagues, Ken Moss, our CTO, and Chris Bruzzo, our CMO, to talk about something that we've mentioned today that we call the EA Player Network. This, I think, represents a major new strategy for us as a company and something that I believe will be profound for us as a company and our industry as well. If you think about a network and you ask the question, why a network? We already make amazing games, and we have amazing services. Why don't we start talking about a network? What is the actual opportunity? That's what I hope to give you an answer to today together with my two colleagues.
If you think about the lives that we live today and how we interact, we all live in networks, both online and offline. Whether that's with Facebook or Instagram or whatever it is today, we all interact with them, and we all use them. They all deliver something unique, but there are limitations within them. With those limitations, you can start to see our opportunity. There are 2.6 billion players out there today, and we see this growing to 2.8 billion by 2020. We have a big and unique opportunity. Networks help you connect, share, discover, and create. That's their value. What is our opportunity?
Well, imagine if our 350 million players were acting as a network or in a network, engaging in connected play daily, weekly, monthly, connecting to each other, engaging in economies, competing in esports, streaming, playing games that actually adapted to how they played and what they did, and taking the experience of playing games beyond the game itself. This could actually prove to be huge for us. If we deliver a network around play that is much more than games and services, we're delivering a network for our players that connects them to the games they love, to each other, and to services and experiences beyond the games that we're only scratching the surface of today. I look at the network as the connective tissue of the global gaming community. It will be as big as Netflix or Twitch or many others, unique and personalized experiences.
It's always there, and it's always on. Playing games that, again, are personalized, unique, and adapted, connecting players to other players both inside and outside the games that they're playing. I think that would be pretty amazing. That's what we're talking about when we talk about the EA Player Network. I'm going to give you a little bit of an insight to what an experience looks like today. If you think about FIFA, I play a lot of FIFA, and I'm a Barcelona fan. Whenever I play online, I probably play with Barcelona. Here's the problem. When I play with Barcelona, I can go online, and I can play with other players, but there's no way for me to meet other Barcelona players, to socialize with them. There's no fan groups.
I can only, if I'm lucky, meet other people that play as Barcelona, but I can't connect with other people like me inside the game. There are no social functionality, or at least it's very minimal. Battlefield, another game that I've played a little bit, I'm a good helicopter pilot. I'm flying around. I'm shooting on other planes and helicopters. When I play the game, that's kind of what I can do. There's no way for me to get skill-based recommendations. I don't know if there's other great pilots out there and what they look like. I can't connect with them. There are no special game modes catered for how I play. There are no recommendations for what to do for me to get even better at what I'm doing right now.
If you think about Madden and Madden Mobile as an example, today, there's no way for me as a player to refer other players to come play. I have to step outside the game experience. In this instance, I can send a text to someone and say, "Hey, come check this out. Come play with me." I think that's a limitation. Where can we be, and where will we be? Well, imagine if FIFA connected you with other Barcelona fans. What if FIFA gave you the option to partake in Barcelona-specific events? What if it gave you information regarding Barcelona that happens in the real world on an ongoing basis? What if in Battlefield, the game knows that I'm a great pilot? What if it connects me with other great pilots?
What if it takes me to a place where you can go to pilot-only matches and where I, as a player, get challenged in a different way? For Madden, what if it had contextual rewards? What if I, as a player, got something for inviting someone else from the actual game instead of me having to step out and do it outside the game? These are kind of fundamental, kind of rudimentary ideas, but I hope you get the point. Again, I'm just coming up with some ideas. There's a lot more than this that we can do. Again, a couple of examples how a network changes how you play. The good news is it gets smarter with more people. If we have 350 million people in our network, it's going to be pretty smart already from the start.
I'll pass on to Ken, who's going to talk about how we make this possible. Thank you, Patrick. Thanks for the opportunity. What Patrick's describing here and what you've heard talked about in the other presentations is how profound this can be, how this can really change how our company develops games in the future, and really how the industry moves forward. I want to talk to you a little bit about how we actually make this a reality and how we build it. It starts by tapping into a simple concept called the network effect. The network effect means that when you play a game, that it actually gets better when more people are joining the game. When your friends come in, it gets better. When you make new friends and new connections, it gets better.
The more data that comes into the game, the actual gameplay gets smarter, better, more personalized. You feel this as a player. This is very powerful, and this is what we're aiming for. Of course, we bring some pretty good assets to the table here to develop this. You've heard about the scale of our player audience, where it is today and where it's going to be going as we move down our roadmap of games. We have a lot of players playing with us. The breadth of our portfolio, when you look at the newest of mobile games up to the most established of console games, the breadth is incredibly exciting. That's key to building this network because we can now leverage those games. We can bring it to life through the games.
The live service expertise that we have, where we know that a game, the day it launches, it's just the beginning. Then over the weeks, months, years after that, we know how to keep it live and create this incredible user base with the deepest engagement, I think, of almost any activity in people's lives. We have this incredible amount of time people are spending with us, which gives us this opportunity. How do we pull it together? I'll give you a little sense of the very high-level blueprint, the architecture for what we have to make possible in order to actually turn these hundreds of millions of users into a network. It starts with identifying the players. If we can't do that, we can't do anything. We have to identify them through any device they come in. They might be on a console, a PC.
They might be on a mobile device or some new device connected to their TV or even the internet-enabled fridge that Andrew talked about. We have to be able to identify them at every moment. Once we know the player base, we have to give them powerful tools to socialize with each other. We have to have them have stable friends lists that they can interact with, chats, groups, all sorts of social tools, a portfolio of social tools that they can use. You heard from Peter Moore about our competitive gaming. This is a key part of the network, is creating and consuming content. Our users in this network want to create content. They want to share it with their friends. That's a key part of having the network effect.
You also want to consume all this awesome stuff, whether it's the top of the competitive gaming pyramid or it's just something cool that your friends did. You want to be able to consume that. You want to share it. You want to share your own content. Within the network, you want to be able to transact. You've heard today about the Ultimate Team dynamics, incredibly powerful. Patrick talked about how you can have players. You can trade them with people. You can auction them. You can buy new ones. You can aspire to own certain items and games. This works across, again, mobile, console, anything. You need a safe and secure, reliable way to participate in these digital economies as part of the network. It's incredibly fun. It drives really deep engagement. Of course, it's a great business as well.
The last piece is the most important piece. You need to have an experience that really is different because you're in the network. It's got to be deeply personalized. It's got to be the network knows me. It knows my friends. It knows my play style. It's better because it knows me. This is where every game team around the company gets to build on the network and bring it to life in unique ways. There's a rich set of tools behind each one of these. If this is a high-level blueprint, let me give you a sense of what's happening right now, what we've been doing in the last year to start to build the network and where we'll be focusing in the months to come.
I will say that one of the exciting parts of this is the company being able to operate as one team. You saw teamwork as one of our key values. None of this is actually possible without us having great teamwork. Luckily, we do. These are the real pieces that are going on right now. In the identity space, we've had, as a company, really good sense of our users on console, a good relationship with them. On mobile, it's all about getting in quick, having the wide funnel at the top. You download a game. You got to start playing it in 20 seconds. You might lose interest. You may not even ever get into the game. We have to go from fully anonymous users.
We have to know them and allow users, over time, at natural moments, maybe to move to another device, maybe to save their investment in time and money. They'll give us a little more information to identify themselves, all the way up to fully registered. We have altered our core identity system in order to support that scenario and are now adopting that in our games going forward. Data. Underlying everything that you're hearing about, everything in the network, so many of the innovations that are going to be driven in the company in the future is based on our data. We have central data systems, of course. One of the things we're doing right now, we've already adopted in some of our games, and we will across the portfolio into the future, is having a set of data that is standard across all our games.
Imagine that through the portfolio, we have this wide sense of genres in our games, right? Picture a match-three mobile game like Bejeweled, all the way up to the new Battlefield 1. Imagine all the different types of data you want to get. Maybe it's a story game like a Mass Effect. What we're doing is making sure that this data is incredibly usable so that all of the scenarios that you've seen today and thousands more can be built on top of that data. This is real, and this is being adopted across the portfolio. Those social tools I talked about, we're developing those as we speak. Those are now starting to be adopted. That'll be an area of innovation that we keep pushing forward.
We need to be able to communicate with our players in a unified way, in game, out of game, maybe in email, maybe in push notes, maybe on websites, or whatever way players are connected that we can reach them. We have to have unified messaging that we can give them so that we can really have that relationship, and they can feel it as a relationship, not game by game by game, but actually with Electronic Arts. Lastly, the tools to allow the game makers around the company, any studio, to personalize their experience. Every game will do this differently. Every game has really interesting ideas, the creativity, the company comes to life here. We have to give them the basic tools so that they can easily know important things about the player and personalize.
This is a little taste of the technology that's going on right now. We feel this deep desire to do this because, as a company, we strive to build the best games, to move the industry forward, to create ever better games. Our players, they need this. They need to connect to each other. Gaming is social. They need to discover these new games and where their friends are playing and what the hottest new games are. Personalization in games is going to be an amazing thing once we get it right. Chris Bruzzo's going to come up next, he's going to tell you more about how we view the player relationship and how the network will allow us to really drive it into the future.
Thanks, Ken, for that. Well, it's a really particularly interesting time as a marketer, as a lifelong marketer. We're at a fantastic place where you saw Patrick Söderlund up here, head of game making at EA, and now our technology leader, Ken Moss. There's really never been a better time for the marketing organization, the technology organizations, and the game makers to be working really closely together. I feel lucky to be at this place at EA and being able to build those kinds of partnerships. Why? Why does it matter? It matters when we put the lens of the player on. Why does it matter to this audience, to everyone who's here today? As our investors, as the experts who help the world understand Electronic Arts, of course, you're thinking about what's happening right now with the company and what's happening right now with the industry.
What we're sharing with you here is evidence of the way we're thinking about this across a broader term, longer horizons, and creating solutions for players. Why is that important? Andrew touched on this. The dynamic environment for games today is incredible. The number of people across platforms, across games, across geographies, even in different business models, is exploding. That also creates a challenge. That challenge is, how do we make sense of it? How do players make sense of it all? How do they know that they can kind of have consistently really great experiences? How do we unlock the fun that comes from connecting with others in a meaningful way? That's really our orientation. We're thinking about, how do we create that value for our players?
We've talked about sharing a lot today and about players sharing with each other and connecting with each other. We have this. This is our innovation in gaming. You all know what that is, right? That's the Share button on the PS4 controller. There's a version of this, the Xbox One as well. We know what this does. You press that button, and it captures what just happened for you in your game. You can share it. You can post it. That's great. I'm here to tell you that sharing is actually much more than a button. I want to open up that definition more broadly. I want to think about the network as more than just capturing that last chunk of gameplay and posting it. Let's think about it as self-expression. Let's think about it as fueling my desire to compete.
Let's think about it as how I'm participating in a community of like-minded players. Let's think about it in terms of my reputation in that community and the way I'm interacting with others. What's my motivation for playing? That actually varies for a lot of our players, certainly for me. My motivation for playing a particular mobile game is very different than playing an EA Sports game. How do we bring that to life? I want to open up our minds a bit here when we think about Share and we think about sharing and the power of a community. I also want to redefine a bit the landscape for what we're talking about. Today, you've heard from a lot of great leaders at EA about experiences and the way that we're driving quality into our games.
There's also been a theme I don't know if you've heard it, but a theme which is what I call the metagame. Those experiences that actually surround the game and build beyond the game, where is that connection for you? Where is that experience when you've stepped away from the console, when you've moved out of the play session? I want us to start thinking about the network of players and how do we enhance their lives and how do we organize and kind of be that strand that brings together their full lives of play? That includes things like conversations and content that we provide to them about our games, some of the stuff that Patrick was just talking about, that are smart, skill-based recommendations that are powered by the technology that Ken is building.
Certainly, we can bring that to players, but they can also build and contribute themselves. There's nothing better than when an individual can participate and add to the community themselves for creating long-term connection. We actually have an awesome example of the metagame experience that just happened 11 days ago. We posted the Battlefield 1 trailer, which you saw. Yes, there's 31.5 million views so far, which is great. There's also over 1 million likes. That's just one level of a thing. I watched the trailer, but I also got to say, "You know what? I'm going to vote for that. I liked it." Actually, there's this sort of big thing happening on YouTube in the last 11 days about which trailer is getting more likes than other trailers, etc. That's a component of the story and of the engagement.
Another funny, interesting thing happened. If you go to YouTube and you just search on Battlefield 1, you'll get our trailer, but you'll also get a lot of other videos that were created by players, in fact, influencers with big followings, social channels, and YouTube audiences. Do you know what they're doing? They're actually posting videos of themselves and their reactions to watching our trailer. It's like an unboxing video that you might see in other parts of YouTube. They want to share their community, how excited they are to anticipate what's coming in Battlefield 1. I mean, the game launches in October. Here we are in May having those kinds of emotional reactions, that kind of content being created. It's amazing. There's real power in the metagame.
I'm trying to connect this for you and help you understand how this powers the way we think about what we're building, what we're investing in. We're really in an era now where social networks are not one-size-fits-all. They're really purpose-built. Let's talk about messaging applications. I mean, those have become incredibly powerful. In some cases, they're usurping the size of other core social networks like Facebook in terms of their size and reach and frequency and engagement. We're seeing purpose-built networks come to the forefront. That's our intent here as well, to be that purpose-built network for play, to create that central strand of DNA in your life of play, to make that experience rewarding around play. What do you need to be successful? When we study social networks that are successful, they tend to have a series of characteristics.
There's a few of them here. One, you have to have critical mass. That's hard to get. The good news for EA is we're starting with 350 million people in our database who we can see, and we're getting to know better and better. The data that Ken talked about makes us smarter and smarter all the time, critical mass. The second is you want to have an experience that actually drives daily engagement, daily, weekly, monthly engagement. With the breadth of IP that EA has and the breadth of our player base, we actually have great engagement. That's the third piece, which is you've got to have great product. You've got to have a core experience that's fantastic.
Everything we say today, and we're talking about the player network, and we're talking about the metagame, we really only have the right to do that because we're delivering the amazing experiences that Patrick talked about, that Samantha talked about today. That's incredibly important. Yet, these are characteristics that EA has a pretty good start, a nice momentum, a nice head start momentum in creating a purpose-built network for play. Let's talk about some of the other things very quickly, a few little highlights of things that are also underway at EA and have been going on. You've seen some of these already that are good indicators that we've got momentum, and we're building this concept of a player network. The first, we could put it under the banner of knowing our players.
In this last two years or so, EA has pivoted to thinking about measuring player engagement in a consistent way. What you're looking at up here are what we call the four core player metrics. We measure this at the highest levels of the company but also in every one of our game teams. We talk about the four together. How many more players are you bringing into your game? How happy are they and excited? Are they advocating? Are they referring this game to a friend, which is a great indicator of loyalty? Are they investing in the game? The average player spend, it's a great indicator of value that players are telling us they're seeing value in the game, and they're willing to invest with their dollars. The last one is their time, session days.
Looking at driving that next play session, that next point of engagement is incredibly powerful. In fact, I was saying last night, some of us were talking about marketing and about player acquisition. The best marketers in our space understand that job one for marketing is to keep players engaged. The best form of converting a player into the next game is that they're still playing the game, the last game. The closer we can get them to engaging and loving and feeling a part of that community that's playing that game, the more likely they are to convert into the next title, into the next content, into the next great experience that we can offer them in the player network. These are incredibly important standardized measures that are now driving the way we think about player engagement, and we think about them collectively.
You can't take any one of these or two of these. This is not a pick three. It's an all four working in concert together. That's incredibly important and a real clear indicator of EA pivoting toward player engagement. Secondly, we also have begun to think about players across a much broader time horizon than just that moment where they make a base game sale or where they make an app install. What you're seeing up here is the player journey. This is, again, common language at EA.
We're teaching all of our teams in marketing and in our studios to think about what's the player's experience from the first moment they hear about a game all the way through to, of course, how they get the game, play the game, and then as they get into that elder state of the game, what are the experiences we're creating for them there? I mean, the Global Analytics and Insights team is within the marketing organization at EA. It's there for a reason because we're constantly measuring where players are reaching those points, where they're either getting exhausted by a particular mode or a particular type of game. We can help to keep from losing that connection to them. The player journey helps to really create a spotlight for us in understanding the whole player experience over the long haul.
Finally, I want to share with you some of the things that are also underway, that are live experiments that we're running. EA Access is a highly successful subscription service on Xbox One. It creates all the things that Andrew was talking about at the beginning of the day, that connection to, "I want to be part of a subscription that's just going to continuously deliver great games." That works and matters to a subset of our players and a growing community of players who want to offer that. We've just now rolled that out to our own platform in PC, Origin. The Origin Access program looks just like the EA Access program but on PC. We're also pulling together all of our loyalty programs, all of our rewards. You've seen a number of them here today.
Madden Rewards is a great example of that inside the mobile game and its connection to the HD game as well. Again, creating consistent recognition of our players and rewards for them. That's underway. Then, of course, you heard from Peter Moore today and the importance of competitive gaming. We want you to think about competitive gaming as another enhanced experience, as another metagame experience that players are going to have and that they're already having today, and that we can do a lot more to create that connection to their lives of play. I hope that we've given you an indication of the momentum we've got in this longer-term idea called the EA Player Network. Our imperatives are really to do three things. The first, Patrick talked about it. We got to unlock the full potential of play.
We've got the beginnings of a number of things that are going right now. We've got to really deliver on that full potential and connect them in ways that we're not doing yet today. Then, as Ken talked about, the network has got to be indispensable. It's got to feel better playing a game and engaging in the metagame inside the network and with those connections than it does without, create that sense of, "Why would I play a game outside of the EA Player Network?" Then third, we ultimately want to deliver value. This is all about delivering great value to players.
The more that we can connect them to each other and to smart recommendations for the next best experience for them, whether that's another game or another mode within the game that they're loving, the more we create that incredible multiplier of engagement, of loyalty, of growth for EA really is measured in players and how they're enjoying the games that we create. We hope we've given you a good sense for and can share with you some of our excitement about what we're building here and why it's important. It's certainly for us the right time for Electronic Arts as a company but also within our industry. We believe it's the right time for us to create something like this for our players. We hope that you share in that excitement. Thanks very much for your time today. Here's Blake Jorgensen.
Thank you, Chris. Thanks, everybody, again, for coming and joining us here. I had a few questions last night and a few today. I think virtually everyone's asked me the same question or same two questions. One is, are you going to announce the title slate for 2018? More than I've already announced it, I guess, according to some people out there. No, I'm not going to. We're going to keep that a mystery still. There's a couple of mystery titles in there, but excitement. The second question is, are you going to give us five years' worth of guidance? The answer is, of course, no. I will try to help you understand and tie all the things that you've heard together today. First, let's just go back a little bit.
Remember, I think the last time there was an Investor Day was before my time, but I think it was around our fiscal 2012. I'm glad I wasn't there because it was probably not a very happy Investor Day and not a lot of smiling people, and for good reason. Our business wasn't doing very well. We were under $300 million in earnings, $100 million in cash flow. Only about 29% of our business was digital, and the gross margins were close to 60%. Fast forward just a few short years, and things are a little bit different. I think many of you are a lot happier. 55% of the business is digital today. That is an incredible growth. I'll show you that in a moment. You can see almost all of that's come out of extra content, mobile, and full-game downloads, huge uptick in the business.
That's driven that 71.5% gross margin, huge value driver for us as a business. All of our management teams raise their focus on, "How do we continue to drive that?" As you can see, in doing that and controlling OpEx at the same time, it does a wonderful thing for your bottom line, over $1 billion of earnings and $1.1 billion in free cash flow, pretty different than the last time you were all sitting here at an Investor Day. The question, though, as I always get, is, "What are you going to do for me next?" I don't have all the answers, but let me walk you through where we think the potential is. The first thing that jumps off on this is the rest of the business goes digital, or at least a majority of it.
A huge portion of that is driven around extra content. For those of you here or at home that are going to take a ruler out and try to measure all those pieces, we don't know. What we do is we have had constant communication with our board around the journey that we're on and how those pieces are starting to fit together. We run on a three-year cycle of planning, which the first year becomes our operating budget. We all lock hands on the operating budget. It becomes part of our guidance. We've done that for the last three years, and I believe we've delivered that or beat it every time. The focus of the organization is to continue to try to drive that. The key driver is digital. We've talked today about all these things.
Why don't I try to add them up a little bit to at least give us a sense of what that five years out might look like? One of the first pieces of that puzzle is platform independence. You've heard about Frostbite. You've heard about being agnostic around the platforms. One of the questions I still get every day is, "What's the impact of the next console cycle?" What I'd like to show you as a starting point is we actually don't think there's much of an impact, even if there is another console cycle. There wasn't a lot of impact in the last console cycle for us. For those people who are worried that it's not a growth issue but it's a shrinkage issue because of console cycle change, I'd just like to show that that's not part of it.
We think our platform independence is going to be key to our growth in the future. As Patrick mentioned and Andrew mentioned this morning, genre growth is also critical to us, we see that as a huge opportunity. There's no magic there. It's just the magic of building great games. Geography for us is also a huge opportunity. Digital is not only just a top-line opportunity but a massive opportunity for us on the bottom line. The player network, that's kind of the frosting on the cake. That's the one that's the hardest for us to try to understand how that might impact us. I would hope, as you listen to the team today, you understand that there's a lot of opportunity there to drive deeper engagement with our games. Let's start with platform independence.
We look at platform independence simply as being able to address technology changes very quickly. We feel like we're the best in the industry in it. We feel like we can minimize the cost of transitions as we have in the past. It helps us continue to invest in the future. If we're building VR, we're building it on the Frostbite platform. As VR evolves and the technology evolves, we're able to be there, for example. Those are the types of things that single-platform companies will be able to do over time. Here's our business. This happens to be through the last console transition. First off, we grew. Second off, look at the components of that business. It's highly diversified and has amazing foundation of live services, our sports titles, our growing mobile business, and has very lessened the dependence on any new titles coming out.
Sure, new titles are important but far less important than they may have been many years ago or may have been in some of the early console transitions. You guys all know this very well. I've seen many analyses on peak earnings and so forth. This is the console transition. The good news about this is the market's grown through every console transition. As you can see, from Gen 1 all the way up to the last generation before where we are today, we saw massive growth in each of those console transitions. Historically, that dip between console transitions was a problem. Let's look at the difference in our business on just two simple measures. There's the console transition from Gen 1 to Gen 2 on the far side there. Our business was 100% packaged goods, traditional ship-and-forget business into a retail channel.
That was a painful console transition because all of your business slowed down as people stopped buying software until the new consoles came out. Second console transition, major transition, 2007, our business was starting to see the light of digital but very, very little. There were virtually no full-game downloads and virtually no extra content whatsoever. Contrast that to the fiscal 2015 year where we went through the last console transition. Our business was 52% digital. We have a huge component of live services across all different products making that console transition on a revenue basis fairly simple, fairly straightforward, not a big impact. Remember, that 52% continues to grow, and we'll continue to see that part of the business become more and more stable over time. Second piece of the puzzle was we were 22% of R&D back in the early days.
Over time, we had more and more operating systems or engines in place. By the time the second console transition happened, we were running at 31% R&D, fairly painful transition. As Andrew mentioned this morning, that's because we were moving from every single engine had to move not just to Xbox but to PlayStation. We had to build titles on the old generation and the new generation. Surprising, we were able to maintain 31%. In the last console transition, that 31% has come down to 23%. We had steady declines over time. Today, we're running under 22% as an R&D expense and still investing in the future. We're seeing far less impact from a cost standpoint because we've moved to almost one single engine.
By the time the next console transition comes around, if there is one, we don't believe we'll see any impact because we'll have one single engine, Frostbite. Simple point, don't spend too much time worrying about the console transition. We're not sure there's going to be one. If there is, we think we're very well prepared with a diversified revenue stream and a very strong control of our costs across one engine. Oops, going backwards. Sorry. Let's talk about genres for a moment. How big is that opportunity for us? Well, here's the marketplace for just console and PC software, no mobile in this. This is just console and PC. As you can see, the two largest genres out there are action and the shooter category, the third largest being sports. Great opportunity to be able to address a wide range of different consumer groups.
We've traditionally focused on sports and shooters. We've done very well there. As you can see, we own the sports category. We do well in shooters, but there's still an opportunity for us there. We do well in RPGs and racing and sims, but there's probably still some opportunities there. Our actions over the last year have been to invest in growing shooter and action genre. As Andrew mentioned and Patrick mentioned, we've brought in new people. We're building a new studio in Montreal around Jade Raymond and a very talented group of people that are in that marketplace that all have deep experiences in the action genre. We think that opportunity for us is huge.
All we need is one new franchise, and you can probably think about that as driving $2 million-$400 million of incremental revenue off of a single franchise. If we can do multiple franchises, remember, we have a long relationship with our IP owners like Disney or our sports relationships, huge opportunities to try to leverage some of those as well. We see those two as giant, but we're not forgetting about RPG, for example, or the sim category or racing, still opportunities across the board but huge potential for us to add incremental revenue simply by looking into the action genre where we haven't traditionally spent any time. Second piece of the puzzle is geographic. Now, granted, games in other parts of the world aren't as simple as waiting for people to buy consoles. They'll most likely not buy consoles in some parts of the world.
They'll play games on PC, or more likely, they'll play games in mobile. If you look at our share of Asia, which is really dominated by China, Japan, and South Korea, our share is a mere 2%. It's a huge market for games, $44 billion between Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Our biggest share in this whole piece is in the Middle East where FIFA does extremely well, and many of our mobile games do well. We're still a fraction of where the potential is. We know this is hard. What we've decided to do is be very, very focused on this. FIFA, as Andrew mentioned, is the tool to try to drive that. How do we drive deeper engagement with our FIFA Online and our FIFA Mobile title in Korea and Japan and, most importantly, China?
Our relationship with Tencent there is very important. It allows us to get deep with a large customer base of theirs. The early days are still it's still very early, and there's still rapid growth to be seen there as the popularity of the underlying sport grows in China. Big chance for continuing to grow FIFA. We're also focused on two other brands in that marketplace. Need for Speed, as Andrew mentioned, is very popular there. Plants vs. Zombies, believe it or not, is extremely popular in China. You'll see activities around all three of those on both PC free-to-play and mobile to try to go after a small slice of this big market. Even if we can double or triple our share, it's a huge incremental opportunity for us over the next five years.
Digital, I think everybody knows this is where the market is going, right? Full-game downloads are still nascent in the market. Extra content is really driving that user engagement that we're so focused on. The subscription model is just getting started, there's some interesting data I'll show you on what that looks like. Obviously, we've talked a lot about mobile. We think there's still a giant opportunity for us in mobile. Full-game downloads, as you can see, full-game downloads have been a major driver for our business over the last couple of years, 63% gross margin back when full-game downloads were a small fraction of our overall digital. We're now north of 20% as a portfolio in full-game downloads. We think that's one of the largest reasons why we're continuing to see digital growth like we are, that plus the extra content component.
Our estimates are for full-game downloads to continue to grow. We believe they'll move into the low to mid-40s over the next five years. Some people believe that that may be conservative, I believe we can grow faster. That puts our gross margins in the mid-70s, assuming we continue to see also extra content growth. If it moves faster, we think that's a bigger opportunity for gross margins. I think everyone knows where full-game downloads have come and the economics around it. For us, a full-game download is a low to mid-80s gross margin versus a mid-60s on a console game, 20 to 25-point advantage for us in a world of full-game downloads. Today, the PC business, 75% full-game downloads. We think that people have been buying things on their PC.
When was the last time you bought a PC that actually even had a disk drive in it? I mean, most PCs don't have the ability to do anything other than a full-game download. While we don't see that the console market goes all the way to 75%, there's a pretty good potential we'll see a lot of growth over the next five years with full-game downloads, which continues to drive our overall margin. Big opportunity to continue to push that. You will see us continue to provide consumers with exciting ways to engage in our business digitally. Here's one that gets pretty exciting. That's FIFA from '97 up through 2010. What do you think happens when we introduce Ultimate Team? Granted, it created some extra content, right? Look what it did to the base game. That bottom line is the base game FIFA.
The addition of Ultimate Team drove a huge incremental revenue spike, but it also helped drive the base game. If you had Madden, you'd see the same thing. If you had hockey, you'd see the same thing. To the earlier points today, we're looking at engagement models for every single product, which grows that extra content piece, but it also grows the underlying game. We want to try to drive engagement to drive both the top line and the margin. That's a huge opportunity for us going forward to think about how do we adopt some of those same mechanics inside of non-sports games, inside our mobile games. What did you see today in our mobile games? You saw live services, you saw engagement models that are constantly changing. That's the future and the opportunity, that's what drives people back to play the games.
Subscriptions, early days for us in subscriptions, we have EA Access on Xbox. We were very pleased with the early response there, we brought out EA Access on our Origin platform. Origin Access, we think that's important. Here's why we're seeing it's important. These are some EA Access statistics. We look at non-subscribers versus subscribers. In the case of playing more, we found that they played 2.5 times more games. We took a static point in time, and we compared the two. When we reduced the friction for you to play games, you don't have to go to the store. You don't even have to do a digital download. You're going to play more games. It's kind of common sense, right? The time played was almost 4x, 3.5, more than 3.5 times people played longer.
That engagement model works when you reduce that friction. At the end of the day, people spend more. They invest more in that time that they're playing, and we see spend levels at 3 times. I know someone's going to ask, "Well, why don't we turn all of our businesses into subscription?" Not everyone's yet ready to be a subscriber to a game subscription. We only have it on one platform right now. There could be a day in the future where you'll see more subscription options. We see this as a continued way to drive what we talk about all the time as more engagement. If we engage you'll invest time and money in those games. Mobile, I get the question, "Geez, when's your next big mobile hit?
When are you going to have a Candy Crush?" We kind of like being diverse. I took the titles off, but that's the diversity of our portfolio. No one title represents a majority of it. In fact, no three or four titles represent a majority. It's a fairly diverse portfolio. That's safe and consistent. It's not only a diverse portfolio, it's long-lived. That's The Sims, The Sims FreePlay. It's been going on now for four years and still growing. We're getting better at what we do with the game. We're keeping people there. That's a long life for a mobile game. We've continued to grow the business profitably, continue to improve profitability as we've gotten scale and as we've gotten smarter at how we develop games, how we test games, and how we bring them into the market. Huge opportunity for us.
Leverage the IP, as Samantha mentioned earlier, build live services into the games to continue to see this as a growing component of our future. Then the network. As I said, we don't really know exactly how this monetizes. It may simply make everyone's life easier so they play more games. We know there is power here and a huge opportunity for us because we have such a large network. What we are focused on is how to make gameplay better, more fun, more exciting, more connected, more social, all the things that we believe will help people spend more time and money in their games. What if we put all this together? You guys were waiting for this. What's the big number? I'm not going to tell you the number.
I will tell you, if you're standing here today going through what we just went through, you got to be thinking there's at least $1 billion in incremental revenue in the business over the next five years. I mean, this is a business that people thought you couldn't grow. Organically, we're growing in mobile, as everyone's seen over the last couple of years, in mobile and new titles and new ways to serve digitally. We haven't even scratched the geographic opportunity, small slice of China. If we can continue to grow FIFA, continue to bring out new products on both mobile and free-to-play in that market, I think there's an opportunity there. As we talked about genre, if we build one franchise, new franchise in the genre of action, could be huge for us. Subscriptions, it's going to grow.
We just don't know how fast it's going to grow. You heard Peter Moore earlier, competitive gaming will help drive that engagement method. We have the easiest way to monetize competitive gaming. It's called Ultimate Team, huge opportunity for us to continue to grow people into the funnel of Ultimate Team. While we don't know exactly how big each of these components are, as we look at our plan and we have the discussion with our board over where we're focused, this is how we're focused. We believe, as I said, there's probably at least $1 billion of incremental revenue there over the next five years. Okay, everyone's going to go change their models. If they had $2 billion, they're going to bring it down to $1 billion. Someone's also going to ask, "What's that going to cost? All this must be expensive.
All this network stuff you're doing, these new products, what's built into our costs right now?" We've been investing in the network for the last two years. Ken's team is very focused. Patrick's team's very focused on how do we continue to do that. It's built into our numbers. We're doing more product development. You saw that in our guidance for this year about $70 million, a little less than $70 million of the delta in R&D expense or in expenses is R&D driven. New studio in Montreal, for example, new mobile efforts, there's investment in there in those numbers. Sales and marketing, we actually have some increase in sales and marketing dollars this year because we've got a bigger title slate. As a percentage of revenue, it's gone from 12.5% or 13% to 12.5% this year.
I know Chris is going to nod with me when I say, "Our goal is to get that at least to 12%, if not lower over time by leveraging that player network." If we're successful in the player network, we should continue to see benefits in sales and marketing. Product development, we've been right around 21%-22%. This year, we'll be under 22%. We think that's the right target going forward as a percentage of revenue. Sales and marketing, we've talked about 12%. In G&A, we're right around 8%. We think we can probably get that to around 7% with more scale or more systems in place and trying to drive consistency across the or around the business. You put all that in place, you go back to my chart, let's for a moment dream if we can add an extra $1 billion in revenue.
Remember, I said I think gross margins can probably be in the mid-70s versus 71.5% where we're at today. If you can do that and hold OpEx at around 40% of revenue, which is where we are basically in the model we just talked about, that adds over $1 billion in new earnings. As everyone knows, the beauty of this business, our CapEx requirements are fairly limited to technology, new servers, and new office space or office upgrades. That's roughly been $100 million-ish a year over the last three years. We think we can continue to hold that. That means $1 billion in new cash flow. I'm not giving guidance, but that's where we're focused. To some, that might be boring.
I hope most of you, that's pretty exciting because I don't know how many people are talking about $1 billion in new earnings over time. We've got a lot of work to do, but I would hope one of the things you saw over the last couple of hours was the team and the quality of the team and the way the team works together. One of our biggest secrets has been trying to drive a mindset in the company of one team. We live it as a management team every day, and we're driving everyone in the organization to do it. That's how we pulled off the last three years, and that's what's going to drive the next five. Huge opportunity for us.
I think, as most of you know, when you generate that much cash, you're going to get a lot of cash flow, and you're going to get a lot of or when you generate those earnings, you're going to get a lot of cash flow and a lot of cash. Our view is it should go back to shareholders. We've demonstrated that in FY 2016, over $1.1 billion back to shareholders. We've talked publicly about trying to target at least 50% of free cash flow going to shareholders. If you generate more, you probably end up moving that number up over time. At the end of the day, some of you have asked about M&A. We may do some M&A over time, but this is an industry that's fairly consolidated already.
Most of that M&A will be small or talent-based M&A versus large acquisitions. If there's a large acquisition, trust that we're going to be very disciplined about how we think about that. We're investing your money, and we think about it that way to make sure we get a return on it. I'm not announcing any acquisitions today, no surprise. I will say that we feel like we've earned the right to at least look at things that we hadn't done before because we've now got the model working better. Our real focus, as you can see, is on organic opportunities. We think talent-driven and in the genre space, focus in Asia is a critical way for us to continue to drive both top line and the bottom line. There's the story. We're going to open it up to Q&A.
I'm going to bring everybody up on the stage. Hopefully, we've given you at least a glimmer of where the future is for the company. We believe it's a very bright future with a lot of opportunity, and we haven't really started to scratch the surface in a lot of areas. I appreciate everyone's time, patience, willingness to sit in here all morning. We've got a few people with microphones that'll come around because this is being webcast. Wait until you get a microphone to ask a question and use the time to answer questions or to get questions to not just me but to other members of the team. I'm going to have the management team come up. We're not going to sit here that long. If people think, "Oh, they've got chairs out.
It's going to be 2 hours of Q&A." No, no. I'm hungry. I want lunch, so. Andrew can't speak because he doesn't have a mic yet, so I have to lean into Patrick's mic. All right. I will try to call him. Whoop. Hello.
There you go.
I think we're on now. Thanks for all those presentations. I guess, first off, I wanted to reconcile some of the commentary around the trend in the industry in terms of consolidation of market share around fewer franchises with what you talked about in terms of expanding into new genres as well as dipping into the cupboard, Andrew, I think you mentioned, if you could talk about that. Then secondly, around the Player Network, like you mentioned, a lot of those expenses are already built into the forecast. If you see good success there and traction, is there a scenario where you would invest incrementally into headcount, data centers, other infrastructure that might layer on some additional cost? Thank you.
Do you want to start on the.
Yeah.
Hello. Great question. As we think about consolidation of the industry, the consolidation is really driven by player expectation. What's happening is players are expecting more out of their games. They're expecting games to launch that are deeper, broader, and more engaging in terms of the content that they create. What that means is in order to break into a category of games like action, like further penetration into shooter category, the expectation for gamers is much, much higher. There's going to be fewer and fewer companies that are going to be able to break into those categories. We believe we're well-positioned given our underlying technology, given the talent of our game teams, and given the IP that we have to break into those categories. The same is true for mobile.
What you're seeing today is smaller-scale games, even really fun, cute little games, smaller scale who don't come with the infrastructure, who don't come with the network power, really can't break in. It's larger-scale companies that have the combination of technology, IP, talent, and kind of live service orientation that are able to gain disproportionate share. We think we're well-positioned for that.
In terms of the cost side, Ken can chime in on this, there's two things at work, right? We are investing in the network, that investment is obviously additive. At the same time, we've learned how to operate in a much more efficient way. As Patrick mentioned, in the old days, we might have had people doing something all across every studio. Today, Frostbite allows them to take from the Frostbite code and not have to replicate that. We're seeing a counterbalance in some of those investment costs by bringing our costs down to other places. Data centers, as Ken's all over this, is a huge opportunity for us to continue to get better efficiencies out of it.
Yeah, no, it's exactly right. Same dynamic is on the server side. As we get these savings and we are realizing savings as we're going, we're using that to organically, we're putting that back in. We're leveraging cloud computing in a really big way and cloud platforms, that gives us more opportunity. We see that opportunity going forward, it's something we will constantly reevaluate.
There's kind of two other things to think about as we think about kind of how we invest as a team. In a world where you have lots of siloed entities inside of an organization, then each executive member who's leading one of those siloed organizations is always trying to protect their own investment profile for their particular group in service of their particular initiatives. What we have with a one-team orientation around our executive unit is we get together on a regular basis, we say, "Right, what are the most appropriate investments for us as an organization, how do we actively and quickly and efficiently move investment around the organization to generate the greatest return?" Given that talent is our number one resource, again, what you need is tremendous mobility of talent.
It's one thing for us to decide we want to invest somewhere else. It's another thing to actually be able to engineer an organization and move an entire organization against that investment. Part of the reason why you hear us talking about a single central Digital Platform, a single central engine, is it creates tremendous mobility of our engineering base so that if we decide as a management team, we think that the network now requires more investment than some other element that we've been building against, we can mobilize an entire workforce against that fairly frictionless.
Ben? Ben Schachter right here.
He's on my microphone.
All right. Well, I'll start over here, then you can give Ben for the next question.
It rhymes with Schachter. It's Pachter here.
Pachter, yeah.
I have a couple of execution risk questions. I guess any of you can answer. Game quality is kind of paramount to executing on your strategy. You've had a series of missteps on execution. You've essentially blown it with the NBA brand. You've probably killed Medal of Honor. You really didn't make a super highly rated Star Wars game. First question is, what can we look to to ensure us that game quality is going to improve? I think that was the centerpiece of the last EA analyst event. It was Larry Probst first and then John Riccitiello talking about how great your game quality was. You guys were top of the heap. The second question is, on mobile, I just looked at the top 20 games. Three of them come from some other medium, and the other 17 were built only for mobile.
They are mobile-only properties. None of the top 10 come from another medium, yet your titles 1 through 10 are all from another medium. That's another legacy strategy that you guys thought, "We have great brands. We're going to exploit on mobile." What are you doing to come up with new IP, mobile-only IP? That seems to be where the money is flowing.
I want to take the quality.
I'll give you the quality one. I would agree with you on NBA. That is something that we've struggled with as an organization, and as a result, we have a different plan in play right now that we hope to rectify that. Overall, if you look at our overall portfolio, I would say that we're in good shape. We are as good or better as the other people in the industry on average. If you look at our sports portfolio, we've done really well there this year. Star Wars, I think, is a game where you have to look at it maybe from a slightly different perspective. Yes, we know that the one thing that we got criticized for was the lack of a single-player campaign in it.
There was a conscious decision that we made due to time and being able to launch the game side by side with the movie that came out to get the strongest possible impact. I think the team created a really good game based on the premise that we had. I would say the game was done very well for us and reached a very different demographic than a traditional EA game would do. From that perspective, it's a success. Are we happy with the 75 rating? No. Is that something that we're going to cure going forward? Absolutely. I think overall, we look at everything that we do in isolation. If you take a step back and look at our overall portfolio, it's actually in pretty good shape.
Samantha, do you want to address the mobile question?
Sure. I actually don't believe that it is our IP that is holding us back. I think it is more about understanding the depth that is required for mobile games and making sure that we have the right talent in the right place at the right time to build those opportunities. We are building mobile games from scratch. These are bespoke mobile games with a much deeper understanding, I think, than we've ever had before across all of our teams. That is really where we're putting our focus back into the talent, the depth of understanding our player motivations. That can manifest, I think, in any IP.
Don't forget that one of the dirty secrets of mobile is a lot of companies don't make a lot of money in mobile because they spend so much on acquisition and retention. Part of our strategy has been to leverage our strong IP to minimize the cost of acquisition and retention. It's worked to drive a great profitable mobile business, and we think there's huge opportunity for that still to come, so. Ben?
One of the slides you showed showed the sports business sort of flat year-over-year, sort of the stable piece of the business. Yet, other slides show massive growth that we've seen in the past. Why shouldn't we expect that to grow more going forward, particularly as a number of the slides showed, golf possibly coming back, relaunching NBA? Why wouldn't sports rise? Why should we think about that?
That chart, if you get your ruler out, you'll see that sports is growing every year, even though there's not necessarily every title every year. The biggest driver has been, obviously, the extra content component of that are the live services. We think that'll continue to grow. Our forecast for sports this year is growth, and we'll continue to see growth both in base game and in extra content. It's just such a large portion of our portfolio growing it, and the titles are so large, growing it at double-digit rates is difficult. We have full confidence we'll continue to grow the sports portfolio, particularly the extra content component around that should continue to grow.
Okay. Just a couple other quick questions. Battlefield looks great, you're aligned in a special relationship with Xbox, and yet Sony is doing so well this cycle. Will that hurt you? How are you going to make sure that you can do well and compete on PlayStation as well?
Chris, do you want to?
I think this is a game for PlayStation as much as it is for Xbox, as much as it is for PC. I think what DICE has done and the game that they're building is going to satisfy the Battlefield core that continues to play Battlefield 4, continues to play Battlefield: Hardline, and it's actually going to bring a lot of additional players into the Battlefield franchise. I don't see any limiters to our ability to reach a really broad audience of gamers across the whole shooter spectrum of players who play those games and also bringing more players into that genre with Battlefield 1.
Yeah, as we think about marketing partnerships that we do, and we do them, and other people in our industry do them, and certainly our console partners want to stand right next to the biggest and best games in the industry, typically what we see is that just aids awareness. It aids awareness whether you're a PC gamer or an Xbox gamer or a PlayStation gamer. Of course, what the console partner hopes to achieve is some disproportionate awareness around the game as it relates to their particular console. What we have seen, and we've seen the analytics against it, is that if you're a PlayStation gamer, you do not reject it because it is brought to you by a potential console partner. You understand deeply that it's also available on your console.
What we get is just a multiplier effect of greater awareness in the marketplace.
Back in the back here.
There's just a couple questions. One of the main growth drivers that you cited was geographic growth in Asia in particular. That's a market with a lot of entrenched competitors, and where distribution often has to go through some of those competitors. I guess the first question is if you wouldn't mind talking about the strategy there and how you plan to get distribution. Just a second question for Peter on esports. I think everyone sees the huge benefits of the indirect benefits of usage and engagement. If you wouldn't mind talking about the direct revenue opportunity for esports over time and also any costs associated with building that business for now, what type of drag that's going to be on earnings for the next few years.
As we think about Asia, the best way to kind of look at how we're thinking about the future is really to look about how we've grown the business to this point. A couple of things have been true, is that focusing on key important IP has been a winning formula. Partnering with key strategic partners in region has been a winning formula. Ensuring we are able to fulfill the local needs of culturalization with local EA teams on the ground, ensuring that everything we do is culturally relevant. If you think about what we did with FIFA in Korea, we launched FIFA Online in Korea, I want to say in 2006. After the growth phase, it's been in the top five and often the top three or top two in Korea on any given day.
We've since taken that to mobile, we've expanded across platforms in region. We took that same model, we took it into China with our partner Tencent there. We're seeing great growth. I recently had the fortune of having dinner with a new president of the FIFA organization who had just come from China and said their plan at a Chinese regulatory level is to have 50 million professional soccer players in China in the next five years. I mean, that's more than the total population of the United Kingdom. You can see how a focus on the right IP, FIFA, Plants vs. Zombies, Need for Speed, partnered with the right strategic partners in region, doubled down with local talent, ensuring that what we're doing is culturally relevant, is going to continue to drive growth for us.
On esports and competitive gaming, it's not indirect. We can measure where that revenue is coming from. We see two funnels. We see two flows of revenue. Obviously, the top of the pyramid, something we've done well for many, many years, which is drive sponsorship and advertising dollars, and we'll continue to do that. There's millions, if not maybe tens of millions available there. More importantly is the basis that sits underneath that, the balance of the pyramid, where we see hundreds of millions of dollars directly attributed to competitive gaming through our Ultimate Team, our Battlepacks, all of the mechanics that are already built into our games today. One thing I want to point out for both our FIFA and Madden tournaments that you're going to see announced over the coming months here, those will all have an Ultimate Team basis to them.
In other words, you'll be playing as Ultimate Teams regardless of the team you're playing on, whether it's an NFL team, it'll be Madden Ultimate Team. Whether it's an English Premier League team, it'll be FIFA Ultimate Team. Encouraging gamers to go in, have a strategy about who their players are, have a strategy about the chemistry as it comes together, is going to be key to those competitive rule sets. Ultimate Team is the core of those. Again, two funnels. We see sponsorship and marketing. If you remember the pie chart that was up behind me during the presentation, that's interesting. I think that's probably a fiscal year away, two fiscal years away.
Boy, when we announce Madden and FIFA in particular, our challenges coming over the next few months here, I think we'll see a direct positive impact to our revenue that will be attributed to Ultimate Team.
The way we think about the cost side of the equation, clearly there's an investment there, but what we're really trying to do is prioritize that investment inside of Patrick's World, for example. How do we prioritize what needs to be done inside of a game? We might not do something in an effort to prioritize this. How do we prioritize marketing dollars to help spend or pay for the activities inside of esports? If they're all driving the same outcome, which is greater engagement, we know we'll drive revenue that way. We try to think about it in a prioritization versus simply an additive of costs over time.
Thank you. Thinking about the EA Player Network and the journey slides that you guys put up earlier, it seems like to me you're talking about maybe having a more direct billing relationship with the consumer over time. I guess you're in the data gathering phase right now. Where are you in terms of using that data to inform your game development or even ultimately the merchandising of the content to the consumer? If you're also managing the billing and the paying relationship for the consumer, what happens when people want to buy other people's content? Thank you.
I think it's a great question. First off, we see the EA Player Network as a means to connect your gaming life irrespective of whatever other network you are part of. It's not supposed to supersede other networks, but it's supposed to connect your gaming life as it relates to how you interact across networks. It's purpose-built for play. That, in many instances where networks facilitate, will also include direct billing and transactional. We're gathering a great deal of data on a day-to-day basis about how our players engage, both in terms of time and in terms of spend. The question around, "What happens when someone wants to play another game?" That's very real in our world. Again, we're not trying to be the only game developer or game maker in our industry.
I don't think that's realistic, and I don't think it's actually good for the industry. What we do believe to be true is that you will, as a player, access any number of games and any amount of content through our network. Right now, you can buy other people's games through Origin. Right now, we are getting knocks on the door on a very regular basis for other publishers who want to be in EA Access and Origin Access because they see the value of being part of that EA Player Network.
As we think about the build-out, as we think about both how we build games, how we build technology infrastructure, and how Chris orients the organization that he manages, it's really about, "Let's not just think about how we can get you playing EA games, but how do we enhance your life across all games, and how would we generate return for the provision of that service to players over time?" The data, just to make that point, absolutely. The data that we have about players and their behaviors in our games across that broader journey that I put up there today is teaching us all kinds of interesting things and allowing us to optimize messages and offers for players.
When you think about the amount of information we have that allows us to then show you the next best experience for you based on what we know about you, that has great opportunities for us around revenue, around growth, and offers and messages, and becoming far more efficient in keeping players engaged.
Yeah. Over here.
Great. I guess, first of all, in the past, when you've launched large multiplayer games, sometimes there's been server issues and people having trouble getting on. This year, you're launching two fairly large games. What are you guys doing to make sure that those launches happen smoothly? Then secondly, in terms of the EA Player Network, what are some tangible things that investors can see that that is progressing and actually taking a hold on the business itself?
Good. Ken, do you want to take it first?
Yeah, I can. I mean, from a stability perspective, from at least the game team side, and Ken's going to add to this, we've had one launch with the Battlefield 4 launch that were problematic. I think there are multiple reasons to why that happened. One of them is the fact that we were launching on completely new platforms and then a bunch of other things. What we've done over the past 20 months, I would say, is to take a bottom-stop approach around everything that has to do with launching a big game like this on all platforms. When all our games are built on one engine, if it works on one engine, it works. That, in collaboration with, I think, what Ken's going to tell you, has made a profound impact on how we launch our games.
It's something we will continue to monitor and something that's super important to us, but I think that we finally have a handle on.
Yeah, exactly. We work super hard across the company to ensure that we have the highest odds possible of having the perfect experience at launch and, for that matter, 24/7 after that. Some of these big events actually drive incredible volume as well. It's everything from how we test the scale, how we adopt cloud so that we can actually burst if we have higher demand than we expect on a game. We would sure as heck like not to be limited by that we know that we can do better bursting, really deep partnerships with the game teams. We are always thinking players first. The very basic here is the game available. We all feel incredible pain when we, as a company, create an amazing game, and people are blocked from using it.
We have a long list of things we're doing. We take it extremely seriously. It's actually the number one thing we focus on in many parts of the company is trying to ensure this past year, Star Wars, we had some great experiences. We had Battlefield Hardline. We had the sports title. Now we have all the learnings coming from these successful launches that all go back into the next upcoming launches. We're always paranoid about it is something we're very excited about, we will forever improve. We're pretty optimistic that things are trending well.
Yeah, as we think about value in the EA Player Network, I think there's a couple of key premises that have to be foundational to the network. One is you can't be bound to a single franchise. In an entertainment world where players taste change over time, you have to have a breadth of the portfolio. The second is you can't be bound to a single platform because people's play habits change. I hear a lot of people say, "Hey, we should be mobile first. We should be mobile only. We should be mobile-focused." Well, guess what? Five years from now, being mobile-only-focused may be as silly as being console-only-focused today. As we think about foundational elements, it's really about how do we provide the deepest and broadest connection to IP or brands or play experiences, and how do we do that across platform?
If we look at how players are interacting with us today, and you look at what we see with respect to our EA Access subscription. What we see there, again, what you heard today, was we're getting more new people into that subscription who have never been part of EA's network before. Once they come in, they play more games, spend more time, and spend more money than non-subscribers. You think about non-network people. If we think about those outside of EA Access, you think about something like a FIFA Ultimate Team. Those that engage with FIFA on both console and mobile monetize at a 50% higher rate.
If we think about Madden Mobile right now. We brought in a whole new element, a whole new demographic of gamers, kind of seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12-year-olds through the mobile game, and two years into Madden Mobile, we're now also starting to see those people migrate into console. They're growing up inside of gaming. They start on mobile, but then ultimately, they want that 80-inch TV experience. Across our entire business right now, we're seeing very strong indicators that network play is how our players want to interact with us, and that network play and the facilitation and provision of a network around play is actually going to drive significantly higher engagement and significantly higher monetization over time.
If we can do that across franchises, ours and other people's, and across platforms and devices, both known now and new devices in the future, we think we're in a really, really strong position and we're uniquely placed to benefit disproportionately from that shift in play.
I'll hand it over to him in a sec.
Okay.
It's Mike from Piper Jaffray. You have relatively more exposure to licensed IP, and Patrick Söderlund talked about the importance of that earlier. A question that we often get from investors is just the status of the various licensing deals. Is there a risk around future renegotiations? Certainly, there's a symbiotic relationship with the various organizations that you partner with, can you just talk about the licensed IP deals and how investors should kind of think about risk around those and maybe the positives of having relatively more licensed deals than your counterparts? Thanks.
I think just an easy reminder is very few of our licenses are sold licenses. FIFA, for example, is a collection of many licenses, over 300. You try to set those up so they come due at different times to balance some of those risks. More importantly is really the relationship that we've built with our partners. We spend a lot of time with the NFL or with FIFA or the underlying teams looking for ways to provide them benefits beyond simply sending them a royalty check. We can tell where all the Arsenal fans are in the U.S. because if you play Arsenal as your team on your console, you're an Arsenal fan, typically. That's a great set of information that they do not have. They know who their fans are that they sell tickets to in their own stadium. That's it.
There's an opportunity for us to continue to share that data to help NFL people onboard new young kids playing football, for example. We try to do that with all of our licensees to build that symbiotic relationship, which keeps the connections there and minimizes the risk of turnover down the road. All those are long-lived licenses, it's rarely an issue.
They see that actually as one of the key values they get from EA, our licensees too. When we meet with the NFL, we talk about what we are seeing in the youth community that's playing Madden Mobile, for example. It's actually quite valuable to the NFL as well.
Two questions. First, Blake, can you just clarify your statement about $1 billion of incremental revenue generating $1 billion of profit? Is that cumulative over a four or five-year period? Secondly, for Peter, can you talk about the balance between sort of the story mode of a game versus the online play? Michael mentioned Star Wars is one of the issues. One of the things you said was timing. You've got Titanfall 2 coming out just two years after the first Titanfall game. Is that a long enough time? How do you think about that balance?
On the economics piece, the way we were thinking about it is if we're finishing the year at roughly our guidance for this year, $4.9 billion, we think there's an opportunity to move that number into the high fives or low sixes in terms of five years out. We could be looking at a $6 billion business. A $6 billion business at the gross margin profile that we're talking about can generate close to an extra $1 billion in earnings. We'll finish this year at $1.3 billion if our guidance hits, we think that could put you close to over $2 billion in new earnings and maybe as close as $2.1 billion, $2.2 billion, rough math. It's all about the leverage on the gross margin that's driving that earnings expansion in the business and combining it with cost control.
Rough math was the intent, not, as I said, "Don't go redo your models quite yet." Peter?
I think it was for Patrick.
Yeah, Patrick, sorry.
In regards to the depth and breadth question, it kind of goes back to the framework I described where depth and breadth is one of the points that we look at. What we've learned over the years is that certain games and certain genres have different requirements for depth and breadth and also if you want to reach the maximal audience. The shooter category, as an example, we know to be true that in order for a game to truly break out and become really large, you most likely need both a single-player campaign where the player can get familiar with the game and practice playing the game to then hop on and play online. I think that maybe should serve as a steer for how we're thinking about it. Other games are more single-player-focused and may completely lack an online component.
That's rare in our case. The sports portfolio is also we have to look at the sports portfolio in the same way. What types of modes do you have? How do people play them? Where can we add to the experience so that we get more players in there? Overall, we believe this is something that we're working on on a daily basis to make sure that the games that we take into market have the right depth and breadth.
Let's do one last question. One in the back who didn't get as you go all the way back. Oh, I was thinking further back. Sorry. No, go ahead. Go ahead. That's fine.
The thing we're seeing about mobile VR, things like Gear VR, is a big upgrade to silicon in smartphones. Displays are getting bigger. We're seeing a move to 4K. We're seeing GPUs get better in memory. How does that become as a platform for you guys? Do your titles become more relevant in mobile? What about Frostbite? Can that be leveraged more into mobile as we see smartphones maybe move towards more of a console spec platform?
I think there's kind of three vectors a little bit, and I think different people kind of take a stab at it. On balance, anytime there is a new motivation for someone to play on a new platform, that's good for us, whether that's VR or otherwise. We look at every one of those new opportunities in the marketplace as a potential motivator or mechanism to drive additional engagement in games. I think as it relates to the delivery of VR experiences in the mobile context, I think we are in a better position than most mobile developers given our history around building deep, immersive, three-dimensional worlds to actually deliver against that promise. I think there are some challenges.
I think the price point is positive in terms of mobile VR, but I also look at how many kind of appendages we carry with us to attach to our mobile devices. Often, we buy them but then don't use them. The trick for us and for the platform holders is going to be, "How do you create experiences that are so compelling that you actually want to have that device out and using it on a fairly regular basis?
Yeah, I mean, at the same time, mobile devices represent probably the most frictionless path to VR today. They're not tethered. You've slid into a tray, basically, that holds it. The experiences are actually surprisingly good, at least from a VR video perspective. I personally believe that that's mostly how many people will start experiencing VR will be via their phones. It's also from a cost barrier, a very low-cost barrier. While the experience will not be as good as it will be on the high-end PC-based platforms or console-based platforms, it is an interesting kind of open market that I think we need to look at. From a tech perspective, the Frostbite engine will function on high-end mobile devices with some work, but it's not a crazy path to get to that. Let's wrap this up. We are going to do lunch right next door.
The management team will try to sit at different tables around the lunch, people feel free to continue to ask questions. If you can't stay for lunch, thank you for coming. We would hope that you get a chance to eat before you leave. Once again, thank you for making the time. Many of you flew from halfway across the world to get here. We really appreciate it. It's a great opportunity for you to get to meet the management team and see the power of what we've built here. We probably don't do one of these every year, but we'll probably do one every few years as a way of continuing to refresh people around our thinking. Obviously, we'll have many conversations with you each quarter as well as as we come visit your offices and organizations around the globe.
Appreciate everyone taking the time and continuing to have confidence in EA. Thanks.