Welcome, everyone. I'm Andrew Uerkwitz, Head of Investor Relations at EA. It's great to see you here in New York, and for those of you watching on the live stream, thanks for joining us. I am truly excited for what we're sharing with you today. In a moment, you will hear from our CEO, Andrew Wilson, about our vision for the future of gaming and entertainment. Laura and Cam will follow with more about how we are building massive online communities and bringing blockbuster stories to life across sports and entertainment. Then after the break, David and Mihir will discuss our strategy and opportunities beyond our games, and then Stuart Canfield, our CFO, will wrap up with our financial framework for long-term value creation.
Lastly, we will open it up for Q&A at the end, and for those of you in the room, please submit your questions throughout the afternoon, and the instructions to do so are on your table. Now, before we get started, let's go through the legal disclosures up on the screen. This presentation and our comments include forward-looking statements regarding future events and future financial performance of the company. Actual events and results may differ materially from our expectations. We refer you to our Investor Day slides, as well as to our recent earnings and SEC filings for a discussion of risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed today. EA makes these statements as of today, September 17th, 2024, and disclaims any duty to update them.
During this presentation, the financial metrics, with the exception of free cash flow, return on invested capital, and non-GAAP operating margins, will be presented on a GAAP basis. For more information on these metrics, please see our Investor Day slides and the FAQ documents available on our investor relations website. Later today, we will be posting our slides on the website with a replay to the webcast. Now, on behalf of the entire team at EA, I want to thank you for joining us, and it's my pleasure to introduce Chief Executive Officer of Electronic Arts, Andrew Wilson.
Good afternoon, and for those watching live, good morning and good evening. It's fantastic to be here with you today and to see so many familiar faces. Exactly eleven years ago, I became CEO, and every day since, I've been grateful for the chance to lead our incredible company, and I continue to be inspired by our incredible teams. In the early part of my tenure as CEO, I took the stage at our last Investor Day to talk about how we had evolved our company's strategy to lead through the shift from packaged discs to digital games. We said this would create digitally connected experiences and new business opportunities. This industry transformation represented opportunities for us to engage more players in our games for more time across more platforms, more geographies, and more business models.
To capture these opportunities, the creators, innovators, and storytellers of EA set out to challenge the status quo of video games. We remained player-focused. We kept driving toward the best experiences possible. We pushed the boundaries of technology, and every day, more players immerse themselves in our games, fulfilling key motivations of escape, inspiration, and competition through the worlds, characters, and stories we created. As we continued to evolve, social connection and shared experiences rose to the forefront of daily engagement, facilitating new entertainment opportunities not offered by traditional media, so as more and more people around the world chose interactive media as their go-to entertainment to compete, achieve, and connect, we created even bigger, bolder, and more connected experiences. We executed on our strategy and built some of the biggest, most culturally relevant IP in all of sports and entertainment...
Since our last Investor Day, we have doubled our player base. Right now, digital net bookings represents 90% of our business. When you look at the most successful franchises in our industry today, EA is unmatched, with five of the top 25 HD experiences in the West, and we expect to add to this with Battlefield. Today, we are continuing to lead in order to take advantage of another tectonic shift in our industry and drive the next wave of growth. At this Investor Day, we will share our vision for the future of our company and our role in shaping the future of entertainment. To begin, let me dive into the incredible changes happening across the media landscape. It all starts with the newest generations of players and fans. There is a fundamental shift across all media in how people are consuming sports and entertainment.
They're embracing social interaction and connection in and around the biggest IP, oftentimes augmented and amplified through high-frequency, low-investment, user-generated content. At EA, we have a unique ability to create ecosystems where we have blockbuster AAA IP that is extended and enhanced through our own user-generated content tools. We know that about half our community engages with UGC. This relationship between our experiences and our communities, rooted in our IP, drives engagement and inspires fans, players, and creators to dive deeper into the content they love most. Today's go-to entertainment across an array of experiences must create unique emotional connections with players and fans. This is the power that interactive entertainment possesses on a massive scale. So people around the world are coming to interactive entertainment over and over again because they can do so much more across all modalities of engagement: play, create, watch, and connect.
At EA, we have seized the opportunity to provide experiences across all of these modalities. We've expanded the definition of play through bigger worlds, more believable characters, new ways to play, both casual and core, and rich, unique, and personal stories. In the beginning, video games were about escape, single-player, isolated experiences. With the birth of multiplayer, competition emerged as an incredibly strong motivation for play, and with the move online, player needs and motivations have continued to expand. Today, fans are jumping into EA Games and experiences to find joy, personal development, inspiration, and belonging. Along the way, they are forging and deepening lifelong friendships, igniting their creativity, and celebrating fandom, culture, and lived experiences. A key part of how our IP fuels community is how our players and fans interact with our content around our games.
In the last 12 months, not only have they played more than 13 billion hours in our experiences, 60 million hours of content has been created, three billion hours has been watched on social platforms, and countless conversations take place on platforms like Discord and Reddit. In The Sims, over two billion items have been downloaded on our owned and third-party trading platforms. People all around the world are doing all of these things in and around our IP. This is how always-on entertainment, increasingly centered around interaction, self-expression, and building community, is becoming central to players' lives. This is why EA Sports FC and Madden NFL are two of the most popular sports platforms on the planet, thriving at the intersection of fandom, culture, and connection.
This is why The Sims is already a global, iconic franchise, growing at the speed of pop culture and, through the power of its massive community, creating, watching, and sharing content, can become one of the most powerful creative platforms in all of entertainment. At EA, we believe this progression, players and fans embracing games and experiences to play, create, watch, and connect, will continue to evolve, and we're building for that future today. This is the incredible opportunity across the entirety of our IP portfolio and the new platforms that we are building to better serve our players by providing extended modalities of play, cutting-edge tools to create and share, and even more ways to connect, removing friction to build richer and more vibrant communities. Doing this means engaging even more players for more time and capturing more value.
And yes, the opportunity is immense when you look in, around, and beyond our games. It may seem both ambitious and daunting, but this is the natural extension to what we have always done. This is the entertainment that our communities want today and tomorrow. To take full advantage of the transformations happening all around us, we have realigned our investments and empowered our incredible creative leaders to execute across our three strategic pillars: entertaining and engaging massive online communities, telling blockbuster stories, and harnessing the power of community in, around, and beyond our games. Looking to the future of sports and entertainment, live and thrive everywhere, we will build fully connected platforms that deliver more value and less friction, where fans can play, create, watch, and connect like never before.
More specifically, this means we can build a deeper relationship between our AAA IP and the community-driven content that we are enabling. We're uniquely positioned to deliver on this opportunity and drive substantial growth in our business. Laura and Cam will share how we are harnessing the power of these tectonic shifts in sports and entertainment by integrating creative tools, leading-edge technology, and unprecedented value into our iconic IP. Then David and Mihir will dive into our strategy to forge the future of social connection and content creation that will harness the power of our communities to build and deliver bigger, bolder, and more innovative experiences beyond the bounds of traditional games, and create new businesses.
We believe over the next five years, we can double our global audience to well over a billion people as they engage with our experiences and platforms from moment to moment, each day, every week, as they spend their best time with their best friends. The enormous potential in front of us is only achievable with incredible talent and cutting-edge technology. We couldn't have become an industry leader without a relentless pursuit to continually push the depth and breadth of what is possible in games. Since our founding 40 years ago, our creative teams, always trying to see farther, always empowered by the latest technology, have led through multiple industry transformations. This pursuit of innovation has led our games to be at the forefront of the technology curve. AI, in its different forms, has always been central to this creative journey.
We all remember playing against the AI, and it has evolved into today's innovations in generative AI. This remarkable technology is not merely a buzzword for us; it's the very core of our business. Beyond writing or coding AI to ensure the believability of our characters, we have always used forms of machine learning and AI across our games and processes. Right now, we have over 100 active novel AI projects across three strategic categories: efficiency, expansion, and transformation. Let me first talk about efficiency. This does not just mean cost savings today. Efficiency is doing what we do today faster, cheaper, and at a higher quality. That means driving more iterations, more testing, and high-quality content for our communities. It means removing obstacles for our game developers. It means culturalizing content across geographies so they can focus on finding more fun for more players around the world.
The lowering of these friction points leads to deeper gameplay experiences. For example, we would not have created the smash hit College Football 25 without AI. That's how 150 unique stadiums and over 11,000 player likenesses are in the game. Which leads us to expansion. Expansion is about giving our creative teams an exponentially bigger canvas upon which to create, and richer colors so they might paint more brilliant worlds. It's about our incredible teams creating characters with more depth and intelligence, telling stories that are more personal and nuanced, and bringing more authenticity and deeper immersion to our already unrivaled sports experiences. For years, we have talked about our games delivering experiences that are always new and different. We predict that with generative AI, we will truly be able to fulfill this promise for billions of people, for billions and billions of hours.
Now, transformation is about looking much farther into the future and finding new ways to play, watch, create, and connect that aren't imagined today. We believe AI will greatly expand and transform the entertainment experience for user-generated content. It will accelerate how innovators and creators in entertainment are building and delivering experiences rooted in self-expression, content creation, curation, and instant gratification, the kind of entertainment that today's players and fans deeply crave. The future of entertainment is interactive. In a broader media landscape where sport and entertainment options are exponentially growing, it is the biggest IPs and experiences that will capture the most value.
Our creative talent, our production strength, our broad portfolio of incredible owned IP, including EA Sports, and our deeply connected global network, supercharged by AI, positions us to have some of the biggest massive online communities on the planet, tell the boldest stories, and truly harness the power of our communities beyond the bounds of our games. Today, we have an incredible opportunity in service of our people, our players, our communities, and our stockholders, to continue to lead through this industry transformation and further establish us as a global leader in entertainment. Once again, I want to thank you for being here. Now it's my great pleasure to turn the presentation over to Laura Miele, our amazing President of EA Entertainment and Technology. EA Entertainment encompasses extraordinary owned IP, including some of the world's most beloved blockbuster franchises, as well as licensed IP through powerful collaborations.
We're building the future of entertainment on a foundation of legendary franchises and innovative new experiences, which represent massive opportunities for growth. Before Laura takes the stage, let's learn a little more about EA Entertainment.
Valkyrie, back on station. Hope I'm not interrupting.
No limit, no ceiling but the sky. No pressure gonna wear me down. The Jacks Winnetees will be your champions!
I'm only headed one way.
That's up, baby. I break every rule. I can do... Go, go!
We're not in Monrasis anymore.
...No wall that I can't break through, and no limits to what I can do!
Wow, now this is up my alley. Wow! Woo!
All right, where we going next?
Hey, you ready for another round, shooter?
Hello, everyone. I'm Laura Miele, and I came to EA through the Westwood Studios acquisition many years ago, and I have always been so grateful to have started my gaming career in a development studio. Because at the heart of every groundbreaking game lies a team of visionary creators and seasoned technologists. Today, I'm President of EA Entertainment and Technology, and I have the absolute privilege of leading an organization of individuals with the grandest imaginations and those with the technical expertise to bring those visions to life. Our incredible talent, brands, and technology come together to drive the best experiences for our players. I'm going to take you through the exceptional portfolio of our EA entertainment studios, starting with blockbuster storytelling. Now, this category is a big business.
Action RPGs have one of the highest player bases and addressable markets at over $20 billion, and while this is a competitive category, we have clear advantages: some of the biggest IPs that attract massive communities, the production capabilities to deliver at scale, and the stories players love, so let's take a look at what's to come. Next month, the wait is over for Dragon Age fans, with BioWare set to deliver the fourth installment of this epic franchise. Let's take a quick look.
You battle against gods. They will not rest until you are on your knees.
You want allies to go after the gods? Where do we start?
I'm ready.
Our Gods are back. How do we stand against that?
I believe in all of us, so let's get it done.
These are the times in which legends are born or slain.
Now, this is BioWare doing what it does best: immersive storytelling, memorable characters, and a gorgeous world. The Dragon Age community is buzzing, and the press reception has been really positive. The game looks great on console and PC alike, and we are already seeing strong demand on the largest platforms. And all of this is just weeks away, coming October thirty-first. So next in our lineup is Motive in Montreal, the studio behind the critically acclaimed Star Wars: Squadrons and the Dead Space remake. This team has a breadth of capability and experience that perfectly positions them to develop our first title in the Marvel collaboration with Iron Man. The game will feature an original narrative and a unique take on one of Marvel's most popular heroes, Tony Stark, in a thrilling AAA action-adventure game.
Next is our studio in Seattle, Cliffhanger Games, and its renowned leadership team, known for their innovation in action RPGs, such as Shadow of Mordor. Black Panther will be a love letter to fans, combining vibrant characters, the world of Wakanda, an original story, and all-new technology, delivering groundbreaking design and storytelling that will actually transfer across many games and studios in our company. While we are early in production with our Marvel games, it's important to note the collaboration is actually founded on our successful history with Lucasfilm and Star Wars, where we have delivered some of the highest quality and best-selling Star Wars games of all time, with over $5 billion in net bookings.
This impressive track record includes, of course, the Star Wars Jedi games, where over forty million Star Wars fans have connected with Cal Kestis and his arc of becoming a powerful Jedi. Respawn is working hard to bring the final chapter of this thrilling story to players. That is an overview of our impressive lineup of blockbuster action games and the industry-leading teams working on them. They will lay the foundation for innovation and the potential for new IP in the future. Let's shift now to our massive online communities, which are represented by Apex, Battlefield, The Sims, and Skate. While each franchise takes a different approach to drive engagement monetization, there are common elements among them: big brands that appeal to a broad audience, availability on multiple platforms, diverse business models, and regular new game content.
Most importantly, they offer a variety of ways to play, great experiences, create content, share creations, and connect with friends. Now, the shooter market is one of the largest and has a high concentration of these massive online community players, and one of the industry's best-known massive communities is Apex Legends. Halfway into its sixth year, this game continues to attract and retain millions of dedicated players who engage with their squad week after week. Apex is known for its excellent shooter gameplay, deep lore, and strong characters, unlike any other battle royale game. With more than 170 million players to date, and one of the most experienced development teams in the industry, this franchise will continue to deliver for many years to come. As Apex Legends has matured, we continue to deliver new content and events.
With Season 22, we are focused on player engagement, bringing in new modes, new settings, and an updated monetization mechanic, and we have our second drop of the season today. Apex had one of the biggest launches of all time for a reason, and in the months to come, you will continue to see us bring new modes of play and great updates for this passionate community, so moving now to one of the more significant opportunities we have as a company in Battlefield. No franchise captures that feeling of all-out warfare, epic scale, massive destruction, and high-intensity action like Battlefield, and we know the most significant successes come when the franchise leans into these core tenets, but we have had a few Battlefield releases that didn't meet the expectations of our passionate fans, Battlefield 2042 certainly being one of them.
But our highly committed team set out to make it right for our community. They've delivered seven seasons of content, which has resulted in the acquisition and engagement of over 25 million players. So we still have an abundant amount of engagement and massive warfare playing out in this community every day. Let's take a look at some true Battlefield mayhem.
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Yeah! Yeah, I was right, you were wrong. Had a gun in my phone, and I can shoot it some more. Got my eye on the score. I'm gonna blow through the door. It's too late, it's too soon, or is it? Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Tick, tick, tick, tick. Yeah!
As you can see, when Battlefield gets it right, it delivers fun like few other franchises can. The shooter audience is among the largest and most committed in entertainment. They expect excellence in execution, agency over their gameplay, a wide variety of modes, and ways to team up with their friends. The size of this opportunity is massive, and so is our ambition to deliver for these players. We've made significant shifts in our approach to development in this next iteration of Battlefield. We have four fully resourced studios instead of just one. We are taking more time in the dev cycle. We've been testing gameplay with our players for the past year, and we have industry-defining leadership. Vince Zampella is leading this massive project, and he brought in Byron Beede as the general manager of Battlefield.
Now, before joining EA, Byron was the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Call of Duty, and way back when, he and Vince led the teams that delivered one of the biggest entertainment launches in history, and together, they changed the face of the shooter category, and they are set to do it again. Byron's game instincts, business acumen, and career success are rarefied in our industry, and I am thrilled that he is here today, so you can hear from him directly. Please welcome Byron.
Thank you, Laura. Hi, everybody. I'm Byron. I'm really excited to be here today. It's always fun for me to talk about this iconic franchise. I've admired Battlefield for years, so having a chance to lead it and work with Vince again, that's about as cool as it gets for me. Vince's drive, how he leads his teams, his process for excellence, it shaped me early in my career, and now we get to join together again with this awesome Battlefield team and make something really special. I also want to emphasize that I'm honored today to be here, but I stand here representing hundreds of developers who are pouring their hearts into the development of the next Battlefield. So as you saw from the video, nothing captures the fantasy of all-out warfare like Battlefield.
This really unique combination of high-intensity infantry combat and vehicular warfare collide with player freedom and choice to create experiences that only Battlefield can deliver, and with the full weight of Electronic Arts behind us, we intend to do just that for players, so let's talk about how we're developing our vision. We've assembled four world-class studios, all working together to build our Battlefield universe. Each one brings a level of focus and execution to a critical part of the player experience. First, we've got DICE. They're the creators of Battlefield and one of the most accomplished studios in the world of game development. They're leading the charge on multiplayer. Next, Criterion Games. This is an incredibly talented group of individuals with decades of game development experience. They know Battlefield, and now, as a fully integrated studio, they're driving content and experiences across single player and multiplayer.
We've also added a powerhouse team from Motive. Now, Motive brings their rich history in single-player storytelling and action to the Battlefield mix. And finally, Ripple Effect. They're working on a new Battlefield experience, fueled by our unique Battlefield DNA that's been testing really well with players. Now, all this development is powered by our Battlefield central tech team. They're focused on enabling these developers with the technology and tools to unlock their capabilities. And again, all of this with the full force of EA, we have the largest, strongest, and most focused team in the history of Battlefield. Now, with a franchise this as important as Battlefield, we have huge ambitions. Entertaining hundreds of millions of players is a lofty goal, and we don't take that responsibility lightly. We're hungry, we're focused...
And this global team of Battlefield Studios is operating in new ways, and we're seeing the results. Our teams live via a culture of rapid iteration to find great gameplay. That's Vince's hallmark, prototyping, play testing, getting feedback, and repeating that loop over, and over, and over again. It's one of our most fundamental philosophies, and it's being incorporated through every area of Battlefield. We're obsessed with finding the fun. Now, for me, Battlefield's one of the most valuable franchises in the world. Its unique history of innovation, how unique the game experience is, how passionate the community is, it all makes the potential staggering. So let me put this in perspective. This is a community that plays Battlefield with over 250 million hours invested in the last 12 months in our catalog of Battlefield experiences.
Now, while I would love to show you what we've been working on with Battlefield, we have a philosophy on Battlefield, to put our community first. But what you can be sure of is we're building a connected universe set in the modern day for players, filled with Battlefield experiences, all of them built with our unique DNA. I also want to share with you that internally, we've been playing the game nearly daily for well over a year. In support of this play testing, we've also prioritized what we call our Keep Green initiative. This means we're focused on software stability so that the game is always playable, always available for play testing. That means, for us, more iteration cycles. In addition to this internal testing cycles, we're already testing with players, and we plan to introduce a new large-scale, community-driven testing program early next year.
Now, that's gonna give us significantly more feedback on gameplay, performance, and fun factor. With all these approaches, we're focused on feedback and finding the fun like never before. So we, that means me, Vince, our development teams across the world, and all of EA, are all in on Battlefield. This franchise and our players deserve our best. So we're having a blast making and playing the game, and I'm really proud of the work the teams around the world are doing every day to bring our vision to a reality. So thank you, and I can't wait to see you all on the Battlefield.
Thank you, Byron. I cannot wait for players to get their hands on this game. And now, for something completely different, our lifestyle simulation games in two of our most beloved IPs, The Sims and Skate. Now, the simulation category is one of the fastest growing markets. The create and share nature of the genre perfectly sits in the center of new player motivations, and we pioneered this genre, and The Sims is the number one brand in this space. But before we talk about The Sims, let us talk about a project that we've been quietly working on in Skate. So there are two franchises that were consistently requested for us to bring back, the first being College Football, and we know how successfully that's playing out right now, and the second is Skate.
The team at Full Circle has revitalized the franchise into a truly community-driven platform that transcends the traditional Skate game, and we know how to bring back fan favorites in contemporary ways to surprise and delight our players. We've been very progressive in our approach to how we've developed this game. We're bringing our players into testing, working alongside them, and incorporating their feedback as we go. We are building a great, authentic Skate game, and franchise fans will see that DNA, but it's also so much more. Players can develop new game modes, hang out in the city, connect with friends, share their creations, and host cool events beloved by the community. And everything that we've shared to date, the city, its story, the gear, music, game modes, and more, will evolve for years to come.
Skate will be seamlessly accessible across PC, console, and mobile devices, allowing players to stay connected whenever and wherever they are, and so far, tens of thousands of fans have play tested the PC version of the game, and we will continue to welcome more players to San Vansterdam by adding console access this fall, and for those of you here in person today, a demo is available downstairs, and the full experience of this game will be available in early access next year. So now, let's turn to The Sims. Can you believe it has been 25 years since we first launched The Sims? And throughout that period, The Sims has provided a powerful place for audiences to create, express themselves, and experiment freely with all aspects of life. As we approach this milestone, The Sims community is more passionate and engaged than ever before.
Let's take a look at the iconic world of The Sims.
Whoa! Hi, Peach. Look at these swans.
That's a good one.
That is good.
It's a vibe thing.
Never miss a beat for the heat. Let's go. Never miss a beat for the heat. Let's go, let's go.
It's kind of iconic. Oh, wow!
The both of us.
Yeah, we feeling all right.
No way!
Whoa!
Yeah, drive. La, la, la, la, la, la, la. La, la, la. Yeah, we're feeling all right. When we reflect on the size and scale of The Sims community, we are incredibly proud of the 500 million lifetime players we have engaged with all the games. Just over the last 12 months, there have been 1.2 billion hours played in The Sims 4. And you know we are famous for creator and building tools, and since The Sims 4 launched, there have been over 1 billion downloads from the gallery. That is a lot of mansions, families, sofas, and lamps... With all this unique creativity, players also love self-expression and showing the world what they've built. Over the past year, players have spent over 210 million hours just watching Sims content.
And with all this engagement, social connection extends beyond the game, with millions of fans connecting and sharing online. The Sims perfectly captures the power of play, create, watch, and connect. So let's take a look at the history of the franchise. Traditionally, after every release, we would replace one version with another, starting from scratch. Well, we are going to disrupt the sequel model. We are investing in a massive Sims platform across more game experiences, more creative options, and more ways for players and creators to connect. Let me walk you through how we're approaching it. We will carry forward the tremendous engagement and volumes of content we just discussed to make Sims 4 the foundation of our future growth strategy. We will be updating the core technology foundation for the product, and we will release fun and exciting content for many years to come.
Next, we will release an entirely new Sims experience, allowing players to connect, create, and socialize together like never before. We will next build out the MySims line, a cozy game spin-off that appeals to younger generations, and we just announced that we are releasing MySims for the Nintendo Switch, and there will be more to come, and finally, we'll be launching a new standalone mobile game, which will be a platform for creating and sharing stories in The Sims universe. These experiences will be united and connected with common creator tools, a shared gallery, a single marketplace, the ability to port objects and modes from one experience to another, and a unified social network that will seamlessly connect players and fans across each and every Sims product, and the potential for the significant growth of The Sims audience doesn't stop there.
Building upon the franchise's cultural power is critical as we innovate for all generations of players, and The Sims is a pop culture powerhouse, and for the franchise's next twenty-five years, we are dreaming big. I am pleased to announce The Sims Movie. We are very excited to share that in partnership with Amazon MGM Studios, our team is working on a film based on The Sims. Kate Herron will direct and co-write with Briony Redman. LuckyChap and Vertigo Entertainment will produce, alongside The Sims team, with Herron and Redman executive producing. Now, it's still too early to share more about the movie, but stay tuned for updates as we mark our twenty-fifth anniversary next year. We are creating a massive community, and when we bring this platform together, we believe we can more than double our annual net bookings over the next five years.
Now, our vision and aspirations for The Sims platform are on the cutting edge of entertainment, and our ability to realize this ambition wouldn't even been possible a few years ago. We are just in this incredible moment. First, the brand is bigger than it's ever been. Second, the core tenets of the experience map perfectly to emerging player trends. And finally, thanks to major shifts in technology, especially AI, we can scale this experience beyond anything we've done before. These are all really important catalysts for achieving our ambition, along, of course, with the ingenuity of our developers. So I'm gonna highlight a few of the projects they are pushing on. The first is a set of supercharged Discovery tools that help players find the content they love more easily. I mean, the sheer amount of content generated by The Sims 4 players is astounding.
There are over a hundred million assets in the global UGC gallery. Now, what you see here is an AI application that uses a photo-based search feature. Now, typically, a player would enter text, "Find a red house with white trim," and this is fine, but the approach has many limitations compared to what the team's new solution is. For example, words can be misspelled or in a different language. If you are looking for an image, why wouldn't you use an image to find it? This feature is actually working today with a plan to release soon, and the video is showing real search results. Now, the same AI-powered image search can unlock a creation capability. Now, picture uploading an image of a model wearing a certain outfit, clothes, shoes, jewelry, all of it. Using images to create content will dial up the power of our players.
Now, this is a novel model never experienced at the scale of The Sims platform and player community, and the other thing we love about it is that this image-to-image search overcomes language barriers. I mean, keep in mind that the majority of Sims players are outside of the U.S., so our ability to connect players around the globe as seamlessly as possible is always a goal for us. Now, as we simplify the creation process, it will also amplify the creators and their content through a rich, dynamic social feed, a place where you can follow your favorite creators, see how other players are using their content, and discover what others are downloading. This creator-powered pipeline will ultimately reshape the game and unlock a whole new type of creator economy.
Now, we've talked about a lot today, but what I didn't touch on is the deep emotional resonance that The Sims has with our players. We have been part of multiple generations and have touched millions of lives. The Sims has impacted how people see themselves and how they see each other. We define the life sim genre. We pioneered player creation for the past twenty-five years, and ultimately, we created one of the largest gaming communities for teens and women. We know the potential of The Sims is uncapped because it sits at the intersection of gaming, creation, the human experience, and social engagement, and our ambition is to build the world's largest online gaming community for creators, all at the speed of pop culture, and we are so looking forward to the next twenty-five years.
So that is an overview of the incredible games we have in the EA Entertainment Studios. Let's do a quick recap... with a slate of amazing blockbuster stories, starting with Dragon Age. The anticipation is high as players finally get to experience this game in just a few weeks. Apex will continue to deliver new modes of play and great updates for their passionate fans. And in Battlefield, we have the strongest leadership in franchise history, with incredible ambition to deliver the best Battlefield to date, all coming soon. We are introducing a whole new massive online community in the exciting world of Skate, coming next year. And finally, after twenty-five years, The Sims will evolve into the world's largest online gaming community for creators, all at the speed of pop culture. This is an incredible lineup.
From the talented people we have working with us, to the strength of our brands, and the vast acceleration technology will bring, we are confident about the growth potential of this portfolio. So now, let's shift gears and talk about the other part of my organization, technology and central development. As you might imagine, technologists are prevalent throughout our organization. They are in game teams, enterprise teams, central tools and engine teams, among many others. But what makes EA special is our culture of partnership and collaboration, which means central technology teams are accelerators to the work of our games teams. This strategy is good for our players, and it's good for our developers. Now, we are moving into an era where massive online communities and epic blockbuster storytelling will define our business, so scale matters more than ever.
We will evolve from games to platforms, from products to communities, and we cannot talk about technology without talking about AI. Andrew laid out for you that our AI strategy is focused on three key vectors: efficiency, expansion, and transformation. And this strategy is built on decades of work with AI. Ten years ago, we started building our central technology platform, bringing together our capabilities around data, commerce, ID, and security. And since then, we've added AI functionality to scale the capabilities of this infrastructure. Today, our team manages over a hundred machine learning and large language models on this central platform. It handles an average of over one billion AI requests daily. It powers various in-game features to provide players with a stable game experience, personal recommendations, and a fair and secure gaming environment.
Now, in addition to our central efforts, our game teams are moving fast to integrate AI into our tools and workflows, and we use two critical lenses when looking to apply AI: how will it benefit our players' experience, and how will it enable our developers to do their very best work? So let's go through some of the highlights in our central efforts, starting with EA's proprietary game engine, Frostbite. This is a proven method for scaling shared technology across our company. This engine powers our most significant sports, action, and shooter games across all platforms and has become one of the largest engines in the industry. By taking advantage of shared engine tools and workflows, advancements explicitly engineered for one game can easily be adopted by another, accelerating innovation across the studios in our company.
Frostbite is incredibly powerful, as its evolution and its future roadmap are driven by its deep partnership across our game teams, and it's famous for two particular areas of game development. First, highly believable characters, which include advanced facial animation, fluid movement, realistic cloth, and amazing hair strands, and second, immersive worlds, with cutting-edge lighting, deformable destruction, and photorealistic textures. When players interact with a game made on Frostbite, they use a platform pressure-tested by thousands of people at EA, and Frostbite only gets more powerful when paired with our shared data, so let's talk about our shared asset library. We are in a multi-year effort to centralize decades of high-quality 3D data and assets. This library is like the Smithsonian of game assets. They are fully curated, labeled, and exclusive to our teams.
This provides our developers with a wealth of content that allows for rapid prototyping, but also game-ready assets they can quickly modify to go directly in their game. This library also serves another essential purpose, in that it educates our machine learning and large language models with our proprietary data. And as you would imagine, this has become more and more critical in this new age of AI. Another area of centralized technology is our innovation lab, SEED, the Search for Extraordinary Experiences Division. Now, this group of researchers, PhDs, and data scientists are focused on areas such as AI-enabled game development, generative arts, and procedural content to push the boundaries of what is possible in interactive experiences. Now, one of the exciting projects they're working on is called Script to Scene.
This initiative aggregates multiple workflows to create a powerful tool for developers to create characters, direct performances, and design worlds, all from text. So let's start. Let's start with a character. We can now create some of the most compelling, realistic character models from just a photo, and we can rig and animate these characters' faces using just a voice. We can also instantaneously create buildings with a simple prompt: "Build me a four-story Parisian apartment building." I don't know. Let's maybe make it taller. I don't know. Maybe we should have... Let's do a modern high-rise building. Zooming out even further, the technology can extend to neighborhoods, cities, and eventually worlds that populate gaming environments instantaneously. If you add to these workflows procedural performance direction, intelligent agents, we have this amazing collection of AI-generated actions that culminate into a scene from a simple text or voice prompt.
As you can see, our technological advantages form the bedrock of our organization and provide a force multiplier to our developers and overall company, and you'll see even more from Cam as he talks about EA Sports. The rapid pace of change has been a constant in games since its inception, but the impact has never been greater than it is today. At Electronic Arts, technology is central to what we do, and always in service of great experiences for our players. We've talked about many things today, but personally, in all the years I've been here, and it's been a lot, I can't remember a time when I've been more enthusiastic and confident about the growth potential we have here at EA, so to go from strength to strength, let's move to my colleague and good friend, Cam Weber, President of EA Sports.
When did they add this to the game?
Follow me, I'm the captain. Put my foot on the gas and go. Oh, oh, oh. Here and ready for action. No one does it like Jackson. If it's true, I ain't bragging, no.
Open down the middle!
CDM!
I got, I got, I got, I got... I got the golden touch. Yeah, coming in real clutch. Give me the ball, I run. I want it all because I am the chosen one. One, one, two, three, yeah, we running the scene. You ain't ever seen anybody do it like me. Don't do it like me, 'cause you better believe-
Let's go!
Yeah, we walking the pace.
Come on, now.
I started volleying. I was 22, but before I was playing video games. I learned a lot from the video games. Got the golden touch.
Hi, everyone. I'm Cam Weber, President of EA Sports, and I feel so fortunate today to be representing this iconic brand, our franchises, and the thousands of talented individuals across our teams that work on them. I've been part of EA Sports since 2008, and as a huge sports fan and a former college quarterback, it's been a dream come true for me. Now, I've worked across just about every part of our portfolio, leading game teams, leading our sports studios, and now as president. And the growth of our business and audience during that time has been remarkable. EA Sports is now stronger, more influential, and a deeper part of the very fabric of sport than ever before. We stand today on an incredibly strong and growing foundation, with so much opportunity ahead of us, which is what I'm going to share with you today.
For hundreds of millions of fans, their connection to sport and their fandom of their favorite athletes and clubs, it's built through EA Sports. Our EA Sports franchises constitute one of the largest and most wide-reaching entertainment portfolios in all of sport. Across platforms and geographies, we're delivering interactive experiences that reach and engage more fans than anyone else in sports. Now, this obviously wasn't built overnight. We've been on a multi-year growth journey. We've scaled up our internal studios, acquired new ones. We've doubled down on investing in new technologies and workflows, and evolved our live service capabilities to move at the speed of sport. Combined with our powerful brand and our sports IP, we're delivering unprecedented levels of quality content. We've launched 13 new HD games across 9 different franchises in the last 18 months alone, several new mobile experiences, and thousands of live service updates.
We're also driving deeper day-to-day engagement in our communities. Fans have spent more than eight billion hours playing our FC experiences in the last year alone. While a typical NFL season includes about 300 games, the equivalent of about 23,000 seasons are played in Madden every day. Now, this kind of growth and engagement, it directly correlates to growth in our business. To put that in perspective, over the last 10 years, we've driven an 11% CAGR in our total session days of engagement across our largest live franchises, and we've seen a similar growth rate in our net bookings in that time as well. Beyond our financial growth, we're also impacting the world of sports in profound ways.
Again, in the last 18 months alone, we've executed on one of the biggest rebrands in entertainment history with a successful transition to EA Sports FC, and now we have full ownership of this immensely valuable brand. We launched the world's largest single sport NIL program, bringing in over 11,000 athletes into our college football game, and we've helped elevate women's sports through the deep integration of the women's game in franchises like EA Sports FC and NHL, putting the spotlight on the best female athletes and teams on the planet, and there's so much more, from our transformative partnerships, to our athlete programs, to our investments in grassroots sports participation, all of which we're going to touch on a little bit later, and it's all made possible by our incredibly talented and motivated teams at EA Sports.
Our leadership team collectively represents more than three hundred and fifty years of experience working in gaming, sports, and entertainment, and we all see a transformational opportunity in front of us. We have one of the youngest audiences in sport, and many of those fans, especially Gen Z, are reshaping the nature of engagement. For these generations, even before some participate on the field or pitch, their first connection to sport will be through our games. Then, their fandom will grow through our games as well: their understanding of the sport, their passion, connection to friends, and their motivation to participate. So from where we are today, with a player network across EA Sports of more than two hundred and 65 million already, we actually see our TAM opportunity being far larger than that.
To put it in perspective, based on our estimates, we believe there are more than four billion sports fans around the world, and more than a billion of those are from younger generations who are still growing their fandom, and it's with that in mind that our five-year strategy positions us for further growth against this opportunity. Our strategy is built on three distinct vectors. Andrew talked about the importance of massive online communities, and we're doubling down there as well, with our most significant opportunities in FC, Madden NFL, and College Football. We're also investing in the breadth of our sports portfolio and leveraging our technology, capabilities, and scale to deliver for fans on all of our EA Sports franchises, and the strength of our position gives us an amazing opportunity to grow EA Sports around and beyond our games as well.
We're investing significantly behind this strategy, and in the next five years, we expect to profitably grow at the same rate, while doubling our engaged fan base along the way. Now, let's talk about our first strategic vector: building massive online communities. We have two great examples, with global football, with EA Sports FC, and American football across our Madden NFL and College Football franchises. Now, EA Sports FC is already a massive global football platform, and on a trailing 12-month basis, it's now the biggest video game franchise in the Western world. Hundreds of millions have joined our player network and our EA FC ecosystem already, and we're meeting them with different experiences on different platforms across geographies and across different business models. With Madden NFL and College Football, we are the interactive epicenter of American football.
The Madden franchise has just had its strongest year, reaching all-time highs for unique players, monthly and weekly active users, and net bookings. And our return to College Football is not only the largest launch of a new console game in North America in 2024, it's arguably become the biggest moment in U.S. sports entertainment so far this year. We've intentionally built a deep connection between these two games and communities, making it easy and rewarding to move back and forth between the two experiences. So these three franchises are thriving, collectively engaging more than 100 million monthly active users across sports that are continuing to rise in popularity. But we still see so much opportunity to continue to grow. Massive online communities in and around our games create space for all kinds of fans to come together. For some, it might mean competing in a deeply authentic simulation.
For others, it, I mean, might mean creating and sharing content. For others still, it might mean watching something, and for some, it's just about being a fan of the sport they love and being part of that community. Whatever that motivation is, whatever that reason for connecting, we can enable it through a number of key drivers in and around our games, including connected ecosystems, tools for creativity, and new modalities of play. I'm gonna dive into each of these now. First, we're building connected ecosystems to connect players to more of the content they want and also keep them connected with their friends. Let's look at our FC franchise today. Each of the experiences across HD, mobile, and online, they are all distinctly different games.
But as each player joins us using their EA ID, we can communicate with them, reward them for their progression and engagement, and keep them connected with their friends across all of those experiences. In addition, we believe these connections will increase the engagement and lifetime value of those fans as well. For example, our players that engage through the FC companion app have the highest engagement and retention of all of our FC players, and on average, they spend about five times more as well. We're also now building our games to have specific connections to enable moving from one game to another, and this exists in College Football and Madden this year. So just like in the real world, you can play through a career in college, get drafted, and then play an NFL career with your same avatar.
Our Ultimate Team programs will reward players for engaging across both College and Madden as well. These are just first steps, and we have a roadmap to continue to expand on these connections in the future. So these are just a few of the ways that we are transforming these IPs into connected ecosystems, removing friction and adding value for our players, while presenting a profound opportunity for our business. On top of that, we're also building out tools for the entire community to create and share content and contribute to the value across each of these ecosystems as well. Team Builder, which we just launched in College Football and Madden, enables players to create personalized designs, uniforms, and environments, and then share them with the whole community. Now, it's already been used to create and share more than 1.5 million team designs in the last month and a half.
In FC, we're launching EA Sports Highlighter and Cranium. Highlighter is a new editing suite in the game engine, way more advanced than the simple tools available on platforms today. So our players can create and share high-quality highlights with their friends and the whole community. And our Cranium technology is an advanced character customization suite in-game, that you can use to sculpt and personalize every aspect of your avatar's head and face. You'll see us introduce more UGC tools like these in the future as we transform our ecosystems into community-led experiences. Finally, let's talk about new modalities of play. Now, as we aim to reach that larger TAM, we wanna meet and, you know, tap into a wider set of fan motivations.
Social gameplay design has always been a part of our EA Sports DNA, from our live services to Ultimate Team and more. And as sports fans, we love being part of wide-reaching social fan communities, and there's nothing like being in a stadium filled with tens of thousands of fans, all cheering for the home team. But we've also seen in our game data that tight-knit friend groups are just as important. In fact, real magic happens when atomic networks of two to five friends play together. When we look at FC player data, we see those with at least one active friend in their network play significantly more session days. So we're lowering the friction with new experiences that allow players to engage with friends in different ways...
Rush in FC 25 this year is a new social-first gameplay experience across every mode of the game, where groups of friends can come together to compete in a fast-paced, 5v5 team play experience on a smaller pitch, with full-size goals and goalkeepers, and the full depth of gameplay that you get in 11v11. We've already had hundreds of thousands of players engaged in our closed beta, and we're getting so much positive feedback about how much fun Rush is to play. That's just one great example, but of course, we're not stopping there. The building blocks of fandom for younger generations are in creation, expression, and social connection. To capture this, our teams are hard at work on a couple of new projects.
They're building unique, new experiences, virtual open world playground spaces, where you, your friends, and the fan community can come together to experience avatar-based collective play, both competitive and casual. These new experiences will have creativity, connection, and self-expression, and emergent gameplay at the forefront. Now, we're talking about two distinctly different experiences for FC and in our American football franchises. And while we're not ready to share more just yet, we're incredibly excited to introduce these new experiences into our ecosystems in the years ahead. So, as you can see, we have tremendous opportunities in front of us with our massive online communities. We're moving from strength to strength, and moving with great intentionality in each of these three distinct areas: connected ecosystems, tools for creativity, and new modalities, to meet the motivations of more and more fans. Now, let me shift to our second strategic vector.
The power of EA Sports comes from our ability to create and deliver a large portfolio of IP that spans the biggest sports in the world. There is great value in that breadth, to reach and grow sports fans through experiences they can't get anywhere else, all delivered with authenticity, innovation, immersion, and quality. Our scale, our tech, and our capabilities not only enable us to lead across all of our sports titles today, it's also what will power more experiences from EA Sports in the future, and it all starts with gameplay. We are leading a revolution in interactive sports through the use of more and more real-world data. We began by investing in our common Sapien skeleton system, which brings more realistic motion and behaviors to characters across our portfolio, and it also includes gender-specific skeletons.
Then, we've added technical layers to our infrastructure, so that we can ingest massive amounts of real-world data and translate it into use in our engines and gameplay. We're introducing FC IQ this year, which is a tactical AI system leveraging real-world data to reflect how real teams and teammates play together. We've also developed a new runtime physics system to make the simulation of collisions incredibly real. We brought this into Madden NFL 25, and it completely changes the feel of ball carrier and tackling interactions, giving our players more control. And our HyperMotionV system in FC uses terabytes of high-resolution video data from real-world matches, and through machine learning, can create new animations and new move sets from scratch based on real player movement. Think about it. Our games are becoming living, breathing simulations of sport.
Athletes all over the world, every day, are doing extraordinary things as they compete, and with these capabilities, it won't just be our community and our development teams creating content for our games, but athletes themselves will become the creators. As they do what they do, the data, combined with our game systems, will bring it to life. Beyond core gameplay, we've also been developing tech and capabilities to enable authentic content at a huge scale. Now, College Football was a tour de force in this regard, and as Andrew said, our new stadium builder toolkit and our dynamic lighting system powered the creation of 150 different stadiums in our game.
Using these tools reduced the production time for stadiums by over 70%, which means that we could focus on adding sights, sounds, traditions, and pageantry that are so unique to all of these schools, like the Big House at Michigan, a White Out at Penn State, or the runouts at my beloved Husky Stadium, then our new Head Start system enabled us to create more than 11,000 NIL likenesses in just three months using machine learning. We could not have delivered this game at the scale and quality we did without these new capabilities in place, and the great thing is, the investment in these tools and tech will benefit the rest of our portfolio in the months and years ahead. Each innovation strengthens our competitive advantage, and you can imagine how we could take them into other sports and experiences in the future.
And it's not just our bigger titles that are delivering the innovation. The strength of our tech and our capabilities power constant advancement elsewhere and everywhere in our portfolio. The Frostbite VFX system is powering advanced visuals in our NHL franchise, from the way skates spray ice, to dramatic goal celebrations, to new cloth simulations. In Formula 1, we're starting to use detailed GPS data to recreate iconic tracks and races from the real world. And just this past weekend, we've introduced the Las Vegas Sphere to UFC 5's live service, celebrating the unprecedented spectacle of Noche UFC. Moments like this come to life constantly in our EA Sports portfolio, combining authentic simulations with unprecedented immersion. That will always be true of EA Sports. So we've talked about how we're gonna build massive online communities, and we're...
how we're gonna utilize our capabilities and scale to lead through our sports portfolio. Now, let's talk about our third strategic vector, and for that, I'm gonna introduce Andrea Hopelain.
Thank you, Cam. I'm Andrea Hopelain, and I lead publishing for EA Sports, including our passionate brand and commercial teams that extend our leadership position in the world of sport and bring our games and experiences to market. When I say EA Sports, it's almost impossible for it not to be followed by, "It's in the game." That singular line exists in the vernacular of sports and pop culture, driven by decades of leadership. It's why our brand is uniquely valuable and magnetic. EA Sports used to just stand for what was on the field. Since then, we've evolved from a sports game brand into a leading sports and entertainment brand, helping fans discover and connect with the broader world of sport.
We stand uniquely at the intersection of sports, entertainment, and culture, and we're putting EA Sports into position to be the first choice in sports fandom and a leading sports and entertainment property. This is a huge opportunity space, full of growth potential, that will stem from reaching new and younger audiences and expanding their relationship with EA Sports and the time we share with them. This is especially important when you consider how the next generations of fans are building their fandom differently. They start young. Studies show that nearly 50% of sports fandom is made by the age of 14. These generations of fans are seeking diverse new experiences and new forms of expression that EA Sports can deliver. We're gonna be bold and innovative, and we're focusing on four categories in particular.
These are multidimensional cultural drivers and emerging business opportunities that we are going for on all fronts. With our massive strength in interactive content that Cam spoke to, we see a significant opportunity to modernize the experience of watching sports, and in fact, to create a far deeper play-watch connection that will unlock new dimensions of engagement. We're doing this today through our fantastic partnership with LaLiga. We've revisualized mass broadcasts, creating a video game first on-air package that immersively blends the physical and digital for fans as they watch live matches between some of the biggest clubs in the world. We're just scratching the surface of the transformative opportunities ahead that extend the reach of our IP and create multiplier value for us. Fashion is becoming as much a part of sport as the competition itself.
Whether it's look good, play good, or just bringing the best tunnel walk fit, self-expression is an integral part of the game today, including for our fans. We believe EA Sports can have a central presence here as well, as fans look to seamlessly express themselves both digitally and in the real world. In the past year, we've partnered with great brands in the world of sport to pioneer new value efforts in physical and digital commerce, and based on our fan response to the first integrations, we're scaling up with partners like Nike, and you'll see that in FC and Madden this year. We intend to take this much further through our own brand and partners in the fashion and sport world. We believe EA Sports can be a central connection to the way fans express themselves.
This is an expansive opportunity we're very excited about, and David Tinson will touch more on this a little later. So now let's talk about athletes. EA Sports partners with hundreds of athletes, and we have relationships with thousands more. We're fortunate that leading athletes across the world are amongst our biggest fans and our most powerful voices, and just as they are creating content in our games, every time they step foot on the pitch, the field, or the ice, we're creating content that helps fans connect with them, including through our EA Sports player ratings, which create conversation decibels that reach far beyond our games, fueling the sport zeitgeist and undoubtedly influencing decisions made in fantasy drafts and more. It's not just the elite athletes and the icons of sport.
We're also helping fans to discover the next generation, which is why you saw us debut Gen EA Sports, our new program to partner with inspiring next-gen athletes at every stage of their journey as creators. Through everything we do, our aim is to build lifelong fans of EA Sports, and with that, we wanna make every fan a player in the future of sport, through our games and beyond our games. We're developing pathways to grow grassroots sport and community-level sport amongst the youngest generation. Our programs, like Field of the Future and NFL Field of the Future and FC Futures, are making it possible for young people all over the world to learn and grow through participation.
Because we believe that if EA Sports can help build young fans' connection to sport in the earliest phases, even before they might play our games, we're growing the lifelong relationship they'll have with EA Sports. All of these expansion categories are supporting one central thread for our brand. We want EA Sports to be the first choice in sports fandom. We're growing the love of sport worldwide. We're expanding the touchpoints we have with fans. We are deepening the relationship with us, and we're adding value to the broader EA Sports community. So put simply, there's never been a more exciting time for EA Sports, and It's in the Game has never been a bigger opportunity. Now I'll pass it back to Cam.
Thanks, Andrea. We're operating from a position of incredible strength as EA Sports. You've heard me talk about how we're building massive online communities and leveraging our scale and capabilities to deliver unrivaled breadth in our portfolio of sports experiences, and Andrea shared how we're prioritizing new category opportunities to grow around and beyond our games. We also believe that as we strive to lead the future of sports fandom, we can eventually be one massive online community for the broader sports fan audience, connecting fans through a new experience that David Tinson will tell you about in a few minutes. But for now, let me wrap up. It's hard to fit the amazing efforts of so many people around the world, and the opportunities we have at EA Sports, into a short presentation like this. We've packed in as much as possible, but there is so much more.
We have thriving, massive online communities that are growing. We have one of the broadest and strongest IP portfolios in all of sport. We're leveraging real-world data, machine learning, and AI to deliver the most advanced sports simulation experiences on the planet. We're building the culture of sport itself through our work with partners, athletes, and grassroots participation, and we're adding new modalities of play, new ways to create, endless amounts of new content for fans to watch, and new ways to connect in, around, and through our games. Our ambition through all of this is to make EA Sports the most valuable sports business in the world. We're well on our way, and I look forward to sharing our progress in the years to come. Thank you.
Hey, welcome back, everyone. Really appreciate it. Don't forget to put your questions in the QR codes on your desk. I am really excited to introduce what comes next, because we will be sharing our third strategic pillar, harnessing the power of community, specifically beyond our games. Please welcome our Chief Experience Officer, David Tinson. Thank you.
Good afternoon. I'm David, and it's awesome to be here today representing EA and my world-class team, who day in and day out, from all corners of the world, are obsessed with our community and the cultural and consumer trends that move them. I've had the pleasure of working at EA in multiple roles for more than twenty years. Community, a driving force for innovation, for curiosity, and creativity, has always been at the heart of it. It's why I'm looking forward to sharing our third strategic pillar: harnessing the power of community in, around, and beyond our games. Now, before the break, you heard how Cam and Laura are driving opportunity in and around our games. In our games, by evolving the very definition of play, delivering services and features that drive growth through more retention and more engagement.
Around our games, growing the market by attracting a wider gaming audience, in particular, with user-generated experiences. Harnessing the power of community in and around our games is fundamental to our success. It's foundational to our relationship with our players, and it's what gives us permission to go beyond. I'm energized today to talk specifically about this massive opportunity we have beyond gaming. Leveraging our core competencies, we're creating new experiences, not just for today's community, but also net new audiences as we prepare to drive net new revenue streams. Our beyond gaming vision is expansive, and we're operating from a position of strength. Consider the size of our community, the depth of their engagement, the strength of our brands, and our enviable breadth across the world of sports, entertainment, and lifestyle. Today, I'm gonna share how we think about the beyond opportunity in sports.
Now, you heard earlier how EA Sports has built a massive audience who engage deeply with our games, so we don't have a cold start problem. But sports fandom is even bigger still. We estimate that there are more than four billion sports fans worldwide, and more than a billion are younger generations. As a result, we see a big opportunity to expand our total addressable market and business beyond gaming. Multiple sources would suggest the global sports market is expected to grow to more than $600 billion annually over the next five-plus years. We're preparing our business to aggressively pursue this new value.... Okay, this is the opportunity in front of us: we will blur the line between virtual interactive sports, where the vast majority of the next-generation audience is, and real-world sport, where the vast majority of the current value lies.
As we think about that, there are trends around three spaces that energize us: audience, engagement, and data. First, sports audiences. Not only are we privileged to serve hundreds of millions of highly engaged sports gamers around the world, we know that the next generation of sports fans also respond to experiences that are social, interactive, and immersive. In fact, our research indicates that more than 70% of younger generations say they feel a deeper connection with their friends through gaming versus social media. So we have the opportunity to drive deep connections among sports fans and go beyond social. Second, sports engagement, specifically the enormous amounts of time that fans spend consuming sports content. Today, there's a fixation on live broadcast rights, leading to massive bidding wars and the fragmentation of live sports across multiple providers. But we believe there's a substantial opportunity beyond the live moment.
Our research of key Premier League matches reveals an interesting pattern: almost half of all online conversation about those matches happened the week prior, and the majority of viewership related to those matches happened on demand in the week after. So the vast concentration of the value of sports rights is connected to the live moment, you see here, the 86%, but the live moment only accounts for around half the consumption. Our thesis is simple: with the right products, features, and capabilities, a significant proportion of hyper-valuable consumer attention is available for a fraction of the cost. This is a fundamental shift in how fans are engaging with sports, and we see an enormous opportunity to innovate on the shoulders of live sports. Third, sports data, specifically the engagement and adjacent businesses driven by the limitless data available in sports.
Statistics power everything from coaching, to broadcast, to fantasy, and so much more. Why? Because every conversation about sports is based on data. More data means more conversation, more conversation means more engagement, and more engagement equals more monetization. In this context, we see a distinct opportunity to use our software in two profound ways: one, to generate predictive outcomes, running infinite cycles of plays with infinite dimensions through our engines. Two, to visualize results in-engine, which can then be used in creative ways by fans, partners, and pros. We see immense value going beyond reactive data toward powerful, predictive data sets and visualizations to fuel the business of fandom. We find the trends around audience engagement and data compelling, especially when you consider EA's unique capabilities. One, our ability to build and connect communities of sports fans who engage deeply over, and over, and over again through interactive experiences.
This matches younger generations' preference to connect beyond social through interactive entertainment. Two, our proprietary technology and our ability to modernize how fans engage with sports content beyond the live moment. Three, our unique ability to deliver predictive data models and visualized experiences. These will enhance sports businesses and deepen fandom by moving beyond reactive data. We will manifest these through new products, features, and capabilities, and today, we are announcing our first product beyond gaming, the EA Sports App. The app's mission is to empower fans to come together, share their passion, and celebrate the sports they love all around the world. The EA Sports App is focused on connected, interactive entertainment beyond social.
Today, I'll also show you a new feature focused on disrupting sports content creation and consumption through EA Sports Highlighter, and a new capability we're incubating that will allow us to go beyond data and stats to predictive simulations. Okay, so now let's take the first look at the EA Sports App.
Modern sports fans are different. Our motivations have changed. We have different expectations from our media, too. The lines between virtual and real have blurred completely, so for us, there's no difference between digital and physical. Stats, scores, highlights, fantasy, merchandise, gaming, and connected content should all be within reach in one borderless space, and that's why EA is building a pioneering mobile experience for sports fans that redefines interactive entertainment. Introducing the EA Sports App. Select your favorite sports and you'll only see content that you care about. Follow your favorite team, predict the result on match day, and come together with friends to share, connect, and compete. Interactive scroll, not infinite scroll. In the EA Sports App, the more you interact, the more you unlock. EA's ambition has always been to go beyond for sports fans.
The EA Sports App is a first step in making that vision a reality. This is the future of sports fandom, designed for an interactive generation. EA Sports: It's in the game.
All right, this app is a bold step in our beyond gaming strategy, and we'll learn a lot that will directly inform the continued development, expansion, growth, and success of this product over time. We're building a global product with big ambitions, and these first steps are very intentional. We'll start this fall, as the EA Sports App soft launches in Spain, with a focused combination of sports content, live sports data, social messaging, interactivity, and gamification around European football. Delivering unique content like this can only come from EA Sports, and is accelerated with great partnerships like the one we're privileged to have with LaLiga. So to tell you more about our first step with the EA Sports App, I'm thrilled to welcome, all the way from Madrid, Jorge de la Vega, the Executive General Director of LaLiga, to talk about our special partnership to kick things off.
Thank you. Thank you, David, for giving me the opportunity to be here with all of you today, and to share our great excitement about this partnership with EA Sports in developing this new interactive sports app. Our partnership with EA Sports is built on a shared vision, transforming football and creating new ways to enjoy the game, both on and off the pitch. At LaLiga, we believe that the main entry point to becoming a LaLiga fan is playing football, whether physical or virtual. That's why we share with EA Sports a strong commitment to enhancing the fan experience in every touchpoint with our huge community of fans. The EA Sports App will revolutionize how our fans engage with football, providing an immersive experience that captures the true essence of both LaLiga and EA Sports. We are bringing the fans closer to the action than ever before.
This partnership highlights our dedication to innovation and our desire to give fans unparalleled access to their favorite sports content. As we are also doing, taking inspiration from FC UX/UI for our current users, the live football games, or using technology to capture data to make FC even more authentic year after year, blurring the lines between digital and physical football. We are eager to see the positive impact this app will have on our fans. I'm very excited about the possibilities it offers for the future of sports entertainment. Once again, thank you, David, for allowing me to be here today, and I wish you all the best with this huge milestone.
Thank you. Thanks for being in New York. All right, thank you, Jorge. Thanks to you and your team. We're energized by our partnership with LaLiga, and the potential of unlocking more new ways to connect with more new fans across the globe as we grow and evolve. The EA Sports App opens up a new world of possibilities for us to reach gamers when they're not in our games, as well as new audiences, who crave more social, interactive, and immersive sports experiences.
We expect the app to include a wide and growing range of features designed to enhance the fan experience across a full range of global sports, which will first focus on these three things: Discovery, the latest news, stats, and highlights, plus exclusive content from EA Sports. Play, interactive challenges and mini games, where you can compete to earn status and rewards. Community, social features make it easy to connect and engage with others, share achievements, and celebrate victories together. European football is just the beginning. We'll be introducing more regions, more sports, and more features in the future. We can't wait for fans to check it out. The EA Sports App is a great example of a product set to generate new opportunities for us now, and we're also excited about what's coming next as we transform sports fandom.
We see that nearly half of sports video consumption happens outside the live moment, yet the format of sports highlights hasn't changed in decades, and we believe we have real potential to disrupt. What if you could relive epic sporting moments, not from the grandstands, but as if you were standing on the actual pitch? What if you could move the camera to any angle you want, so you could analyze and debate those moments with your friends? Earlier, Cam shared how players can use the new EA Sports Highlighter for in-game creation, starting with FC 25. We intend to take this technology beyond, to disrupt how fans consume sports highlights entirely. We're gonna take a look at a concept video of this, specifically through the world of global football, and I want you to watch for a few things. First, the real-world highlights.
We have a few of them in this video, which we then seamlessly ingest with our game engine, and then provide tools for fans to reimagine the highlight on their own.
So when I begin, there's no chance of them charge the pitch on with tricks, no calmness. Lit like an arsonist, armed with twenty man and a karma, bitch. In the field like an Amish kid. Tarnished with pain, but I harnessed it. Turned into fire, now I'm charring it.
Good one. Kevin De Bruyne!
Only win when I start to spin, got the crowd locked in, let the art begin, yeah. Only thing that my heart is in, a cloud with the smoke when I start to sing, yeah. Range, but no land to claim, yeah. Got paid and a hand to change, so I got paid with the man and played, yeah. Got lost, now I'm center stage.
Oh, it's been given away by Maatsen. This joy will wrap it up. Vinícius Júnior pounces.
All right. Finally, let's talk about predictive simulations. Driving almost every conversation that fans have about sports is the debate: Who will win and why? Who didn't win, and why not? That's right, whether it's about the past, the present, or the future of sports, we love to speculate, to imagine, to reimagine. Like, for example, who would have won between the '85 Bears and the '07 Patriots ? Who really is the UFC GOAT, GSP or Khabib? If they were in equal machinery, would this season's F1 world champ be Lando or Max? And who will win the upcoming SEC showdown between Alabama and Georgia? We're the ones with the technology and data to find the answers, and we will do this through predictive simulations that tap into EA Sports' pipeline of real-world data, both stats and volumetric, combined with our game AI and IQ system.
We see this becoming a unique value add to multiple sports-adjacent experiences that exist today, like fantasy, for example, and when we look across the wider sports landscape, youth and amateur sports also come to mind, as does broadcast. Let's take a look at an early prototype. We see a massive opportunity here to completely transform the way sports are experienced. This is the next logical evolution of our capabilities and uniquely positions EA as the primary portal to scale sports engagement beyond social, beyond live, beyond data, and as we go beyond, this opens up even more opportunities for new value creation, so let's talk about advertising and sponsorships. There are three key insights about the ad business that jump out beyond the rest. They signal a clear advantage for us, especially right now.
One, digital advertising spend today is larger than what the entire market was just five years ago. It's forecast to reach more than $800 billion by 2028. Two, more than 90% of that spend is projected to come from North America, APAC, and Western Europe. This mirrors the geographies where we have the largest audiences and the deepest engagement. Three, as a medium, social and interactive entertainment is valued by advertisers for its ability to reach these deeply engaged consumers, massive audiences who spend significant time engaging on a daily basis. With that in mind, we intend to enable a breadth of new inventory that spans across scaled advertising, sponsorships, and contextual commerce. We expect these categories to be available across the spectrum of our experiences, and we see incredible opportunities, especially beyond gaming. Imagine the expanse of opportunity within the new EA Sports App.
We envision a world where many millions of sports fans all across the globe socially connect and repeatedly interact on a daily basis, ripe territory for advertisers looking to reach deeply engaged sports fans en masse. We plan to integrate sponsorships within the EA Sports App this fiscal year and scaled advertising opportunities beginning next year. As we expand our B2B efforts, we're also pursuing contextual commerce. Here's a concept video where we show how, together with global retailers, leagues, clubs, and manufacturers, we could make it easy for fans to acquire the latest gear for their favorite footballers are wearing from right inside of EA Sports FC. This example is from LaLiga's official online store, which gives a glimpse into just some of the possibilities. All right, harnessing the power of community in, around, and beyond our games presents a profound opportunity.
We're taking action across a series of experiences on near-term and longer-term horizons to serve our communities, reach new audiences, and unlock new value. What you just saw is a taste, and we'll be accelerating our pipeline of incubation to unlock new value alongside scaling a new advertising and sponsorship business. Thanks for the time, and I'm incredibly excited at the opportunity ahead. Now, let me hand it back to Andrew.
Thanks, David. What an incredible day so far. Our teams are delivering on our long-term strategy of building massive online communities, telling blockbuster stories, and harnessing the power of community in, around, and beyond our games. What we heard from Laura is an incredibly exciting lineup of bold experiences and blockbuster storytelling at its finest across Battlefield, The Sims, Apex, Dragon Age, Skate, and many more. We heard from Cam about our ambition to expand our sports games and experiences to establish EA Sports as the most valuable sports business in the world. And we heard from David on how we are creating new and inspiring ways to engage and grow our communities beyond the bounds of our games. All these experiences are real and underway today.
As I referenced at the outset, I continue to be inspired by our incredible teams, and now I am sure you can see why. We also talked a great deal about our leading-edge technology as a foundation of our innovation. As part of this, our teams are doing incredible things with AI to drive increased efficiency and meaningful expansion in the experiences we create. This is all truly exciting for us and for our players. We also have an eye on the future. Pioneering is a core value at Electronic Arts, and it is for this reason that we continue to see farther, asking ourselves: What is next? What is possible? And how do we drive transformation across our industry? In the context of generative AI, transformation is where we will unlock and build entirely new categories of entertainment and social ecosystems yet unimagined.
We've seen how the power of the internet transformed our business to unlock entirely new types of game modalities, vectors of engagement, business models, platforms, and new markets. We believe AI is the next great opportunity for our business to unlock new levels of value long-term. With that, I'm excited to welcome to the stage Chief Strategy Officer, Mihir Vaidya, to share more about AI's transformative potential and give us a sneak peek into some early experiments.
Thanks, Andrew. Hi, everyone. I'm Mihir Vaidya, Chief Strategy Officer. In my role, I have the privilege of working with many of the talented leaders you saw on stage today to drive EA's long-term value creation. This role includes the especially fun job of exploring ventures in new, high-growth domains. So as you can imagine, I've been spending a lot of time exploring the frontiers of generative AI, and I'm here today to tell you a little bit about the transformative growth potential we see for our company in a future supercharged by AI. As Andrew mentioned, AI is certainly not a buzzword for us. We have over 100 AI projects across three strategic categories: efficiency, expansion, and transformation. And as you saw from Cam and Laura's presentations, some of these projects, especially those linked to efficiency and expansion, well, they're already in production today.
These serve as strong foundations for our longer-term transformation. Now, I'd like to build on these foundations and share more about some of our projects and experiments in our last category of AI opportunity, which is transformation. But before I do this, let me take a moment to set some context for what you're about to see. Let's go back in time to the early 2000s, when we started to see the emergence of some interesting new categories of entertainment, things like makeup tutorial videos, reaction videos, and my personal favorite, cat videos. At the time, critics dismissed these as amateur, as niche. But today, these same categories, they drive trillions of hours of viewership. And this doesn't mean people stop watching existing categories of video entertainment, like movies and TV shows. In fact, they also grew in parallel.
I think this highlights two things about the realm of entertainment: first, that experimental new products anchored on transformative new technologies, they may feel rudimentary at the start, but they can evolve into so much more, and second, that over time, they can unlock new and adjacent categories that ultimately expand the market as opposed to cannibalize it. With this context in mind, I invite you to join me for a short tour, where we're going to take a sneak peek at a few of our early experiments in service of AI transformation. These are not in our immediate launch roadmap and should be instead viewed as our equivalents of early YouTube videos. They might feel rudimentary, especially when compared to the triple A polished games you saw earlier in the day.
But that's okay, because, one, they will naturally get better as AI models improve, and two, because the experiences stemming from these experiments are not intended to replace triple-A games, but instead unlock new and adjacent categories that add as opposed to take away from the existing gaming market. Perhaps the best way to frame our early experiments is as early attempts to answer a few important what-if questions. These questions include, one, what if we took all our proprietary data and technology and all the amazing AI tools that we're building for our own developers, things like Script to Scene or Text to Building, and put it in the hands of our players, so that our players can convert their imaginations into creations without coding expertise?
Two, what if we use generative AI to move beyond simple AI companions to create even more believable athletes and characters and then extend them beyond the game? And three, what if we took our newfound creation capabilities and then found a way to create entirely new types of social ecosystems? With these questions in mind, let's start our tour. We'll begin with imagination to creation. Now, I should probably call out some important nuances when, you know, we talk about a concept like imagination to creation. To avoid confusion, it does not mean imagination to game, for the very simple reason that making amazing games, like the ones you saw from Cam and Laura earlier today, well, that's complex, and there are many layers to this complexity.
The first layer has to do with creation itself and dealing with the mind-boggling number of inputs needed to create an interactive and immersive environment. These inputs include 3D modeling, control schemes, physics simulation, and so much more. Then there's the complex task of making the environment fun. This is about compelling gameplay, characters, narratives, worlds, social features that keep players engaged over long periods of time. Then there's commercial complexity, which is about sophisticated live ops and well-balanced in-game economies. And finally, there's complexity linked to scale. This means ensuring the game works across business models, platforms, geographies, and for massive online communities, it means creating a consistent, low-latency experience for over tens or hundreds of players who are sharing that same world together all at once.
In a future where games might be generated as opposed to rendered, well, this hard work of simultaneous processing will evolve into the much harder work of simultaneous prediction. Of course, despite these many layers of complexity, it doesn't mean generative AI can't improve some pieces of this complex puzzle. While these pieces may not yet add up to a modern triple-A game, we think they can enable profound new experiences in their own right, including user-generated experiences, or UGC. In fact, we believe there's a massive opportunity space that sits between today's UGC paradigm and imagination to game. We call this space imagination to creation... To bring this to life, let me show you a concept video that stitches together some of our more exciting experiments in service of imagination to creation. Let's take a look.
Hey, what if we made a game out of cardboard boxes?
Yeah, let's do it.
Make a maze of cardboard boxes. What do you think?
Hmm, not bad, but maybe a little too simple. Make it more complex. How's that?
What if we make it multi-level? Whoa, let's give that one a go.
That's cool. All right, who are we gonna play as? Make two characters with weapons. Hmm, I want-
Okay, let's see.
Um...
Here we go.
Oh, I like this one. Not that one.
Now, my weapon of choice.
How about... Ooh, not bad, not bad.
Okay, that's cool, but how do we fight? Show me one v one combat options.
It should be a death match.
Right?
Here I come.
You've got to find me first.
Wait, what if we made it so we could only die from a grenade?
Oh, now I'm definitely going to win. Add a rule that you can only die by grenade.
I'm almost there.
I've got something for you. Almost got you.
Nice try.
Ugh, dead end. I think this world needs to be bigger. Make it more epic. Wow, are you seeing this?
Yeah.
That's awesome.
Let me take a moment to describe some of the more transformative elements embedded in the video you just saw. What you saw was an illustration of two friends jumping into an open sandbox and then creating a new world made of boxes in real time, without any coding expertise, and in a matter of seconds. They then quickly shifted to remixing existing elements from their favorite EA games, asset libraries, databases, and communities, elements like characters, weapons, gameplay systems, and logic. Even here, the incredible thing is they were able to do this instantaneously using nothing more than natural language. This remixing of foundational elements would not be possible without EA's massive proprietary data set, which includes hundreds of thousands of high-quality 3D assets, millions of lines of code, billions of gameplay hours, and trillions of telemetry events.
This is all invaluable data as we think about the training of our own custom creation models, and our data set grows by the minute, as we're a digital life services company with millions of daily touch points with our communities. Now, going back to the video, once the players you saw, you know, they were happy with their initial creations, they started to play, and they were able to rapidly iterate on the fun as they went along. Ultimately, by the end, they created a social game experience, one that started with our triple-A content as a foundation, but that quickly took on a life of its own, beyond something we built. Over time, you can imagine these same players, and others like them, continuing to build in, around, and beyond EA's foundations, maybe even creating experiences that become the basis of entirely new chart-topping IPs.
This would represent a new level of symbiotic relationship between our own developers and UGC creators, and one with our own IPs being the launchpads for new experiences and businesses. We hope this gives you a taste of our vision for the future of UGC, a world of true imagination to creation, and we're well positioned to execute on this vision. Our confidence is rooted in our leadership in a few areas. Beyond our vision, these areas include game development, technology and AI, and what I briefly mentioned earlier, data. These are all core ingredients for the future of UGC and also happen to be the core strengths of our company. Now, let's shift gears and continue our tour by talking about other transformative opportunities unlocked by AI, specifically, more believable characters. Why characters?
We can't ignore the fact that humans build meaningful relationships with characters throughout their lives, from kids idolizing superheroes to, later in life, adults following celebrities, athletes, influencers. But these relationships are arguably the most meaningful in the context of video games. This is for a few reasons. First, unlike the one-sided relationships we may have with celebrities, our relationships with characters in video games are two-sided, and they have real depth. We spend hundreds of hours with our favorite video game characters, exploring new worlds, racing cars, competing in sports, taking on bad guys, even building bustling towns. And video game characters stand out in a world increasingly filled with vanilla chatbot companions there to serve our every need. Our characters in video games, they have dynamic personalities, rich backstories, memories, preferences, even perspectives. Oftentimes, we have to work to win them over, making the relationship truly two-sided.
As a result of all of this, characters born from video games are ones that we actually care about, and that is profound. Now, of course, with AI, we can bring even more believable characters to life, ones we care even more about. Look, I'm sure over the past year, many of you have seen demos of AI characters from different companies, ones that attempt to show you the magic of new AI-powered characters. However, we believe most of these demos, they're pre-recorded rather than live and interactive, which, in our view, diminishes their magic. This isn't a critique. After all, AI technology, it's still evolving, and it's not always stable in real-time applications. As a company that thrives on interactivity, we felt compelled to do things differently.
We didn't want to just show you an AI character on stage, but we wanted everyone to experience the magic of interacting with one firsthand. That's why we developed a real-time version of none other than the cover star of FC 25, Jude Bellingham, or an AI version of him, one that the real Jude lent us his likeness for. We've set up the ability for you to interact with a live version of him on the reception floor. And the great thing about going through the process of creating an AI likeness of Jude is that it reaffirmed our belief that while LLMs and 3D avatars are certainly important pieces of the AI character puzzle, there are three additional ingredients that matter even more. These ingredients include, one, the ability to create iconic personalities that matter.
For real-world personalities, this requires trust and authenticity, which we've cultivated with our partners for decades, and for fictional characters, this means enabling developers and players to bring compelling characters to life. Two, expansive digital environments, where interactions with characters feel natural and high utility, like in our games and experiences, and three, the ability to create characters with spatial intelligence and world awareness. This is the natural extension of the capabilities we've been building into characters for many decades. Now, for those of you at home and unable to join us on the reception floor, here's a little snippet of what the AI version of Jude Bellingham looks like once we combine these critical ingredients together.
I'll perhaps share one quick note before I play this snippet: because this is an early-stage experiment, it doesn't yet fully leverage the full scope of our technology at EA, and is certainly not at the same level of visual quality as our AAA sports games. Our experimental focus was on the underlying AI technology and interactivity, as opposed to the visuals, movements, animations, and as a result, our experiment uses old visual assets and rendering technology, and where the magic is not about what you see, but about the interactivity. With that being said, let's take a look at the snippet. What you're about to see is his response when earlier today, I asked him something I've often wondered, which is, 'Was it-- What is it like to play at the Bernabéu in front of millions of screaming fans?' Let's see what Jude said.
It's like a dream come true. Stepping onto the pitch for the first time, it was a surreal feeling. I mean, I grew up watching Real Madrid. I even played as them in EA games with my brother, Joe. So to actually play for real in front of all those fans, it's something you can't really explain.
Now, that's just a very small taste of the experience of interacting with the AI likeness of Jude in real time. Look, I would love to show you my full real-time conversation with him, but in this specific context, seeing really isn't believing. The magic is less about what you see and more about the interaction. So I encourage you to join us on the floor later if you'd like to interact with him yourself. And as I said earlier, this experiment was focused on the interactions with the AI, as opposed to the visuals. But you can only imagine how much more powerful this will be once we add world-class animations, visual graphics, all the things that our incredible teams are known for.
Even at this early stage, we can't help but imagine the profound range of interactions that might now be possible with more believable characters like Jude, certainly in the context of a game, but potentially beyond games entirely. As our lives become increasingly digital and the internet becomes increasingly spatial, it's not hard to imagine taking our favorite characters, ones that we already spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours with, to other contexts in our digital lives, like social media, news, shopping, online learning, even those FaceTime calls with your parents, where you have to show them how to fix their laptops for the hundredth time.
We think the opportunity to give characters, both the ones we create and the ones that our players create, life and persistence beyond the bounds of games is a profound opportunity, and few are better positioned to manifest it over the long term. Now, this might be a good segue to the final set of experiments on our tour, experiments that attempt to answer our final what if question. Specifically, what if we took our newfound AI capabilities around both imagination and creation and more believable characters, and then found a way to create entirely new types of social ecosystems? Ecosystems that are still centered around real-world friends and communities, but are also infused with AI-powered characters and entirely new types of interactive experiences. Let me bring this to life by showing you one of our concepts for a new type of social ecosystem.
This particular concept is code-named Project Air. Our idea is that when you and your friends enter Air, you start by creating new characters using nothing more than a few simple text prompts. You then immediately interact with these characters, and your interactions go far beyond basic chat, meaning they feel fun, kind of like a game. You then instantly publish your creations for the world to see, and this loop forms the basis of our vision for a new type of social ecosystem, one where anyone can create fun, playable, watchable experiences with their friends and at an infinite scale, with no limits to how many characters and experiences they can create and share, or how much they can engage with these experiences.
Now, let's take a look at a concept video of Project Air, one that brings to life the journey of a player who enters the Air mobile app to create a character called Ace Desai, a legendary investor. Let's take a look.
Time to bring Ace to life. I'm thinking a high-stakes VC who swims in the deep waters of innovation. There he is, Ace Desai. Let's give Ace a challenge. How about pitching him a business idea and seeing if I can lock in that investment? This is perfect. Let's share Ace with the world and see if anyone can win him over. Boom, published. Everyone's gonna see this. So let's see if Ace thinks I'm worth investing in. Maybe I should invite some backup. Let's see who's online. Ah, David's in the room. It's go time! All right, David, time to pitch like the pros. Okay, what's a quick win? Oh, I know, self-tying shoes. He's not sold yet. Let's see if the AI copilot can help. Let's give it some words to adlib. I'm thinking athletes and. Oh, David is suggesting potato. Why not? Let's give it a shot.
Wow, that's really clever. He's in. We got it. Secured the bag. We're rolling in funding now. Okay, I wonder what else is out there?
What you just saw was an illustration of a new type of social ecosystem, where friends can come together and create and engage with AI characters and experiences in a matter of seconds. While this was a very early-stage experiment, you can imagine ecosystems like Project Air evolving, and over time, potentially reframing what online social interactions look like for newer generations of consumers. To learn more, I encourage you to join us on the reception floor, where you'll be able to interact with a live version of Project Air, and of course, the AI likeness of Jude. Now, let me bring this full circle and reference something I said at the very beginning, which is that our early-stage experiments will look rudimentary when compared to AAA games.
And as I mentioned then, this is okay, because the types of experiments you saw today have more to do with new categories of entertainment that don't yet exist. In this context, our focus should be less on outputs, such as visual fidelity and depth of experience, and more on the inputs, such as the underlying technology and the user motivations and engagement modalities unlocked by the technology. Let's just consider the YouTube videos from the very start of the presentation. These didn't offer superior outputs compared to movies and TV shows. Instead, they were great because of an entirely new type of input: a user engagement loop where anyone could create, share, watch, connect easily, quickly, infinitely, powered by the internet. And it was this loop that spawned transformative outputs, both in the form of new categories of video entertainment and social network effects.
You should view what we showed you today similarly. At the core of many of these concepts are new types of inputs, specifically new types of engagement loops, where anyone can play, connect, create, and watch, all in a matter of seconds with their friends, powered by generative AI. These are the inputs that we believe could unlock transformative outputs over the long term, new types of entertainment, new social ecosystems, and ultimately, step-function additions to our already growing TAM. With that, I'll conclude our tour by saying that, you know, what you saw on stage today, it's all still just the tip of the iceberg, and while it may be hard to put an exact number on some of these experiments, know that we are very intentionally planting the seeds for the future. We look forward to sharing more details about our AI transformation experiments in the future.
For now, I'll hand things off to our CFO, Stuart Canfield, who will share more about our transformation journey. Thank you.
Thank you, Mihir. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Stuart Canfield. It's a pleasure to be here at our first Investor Day since twenty sixteen, and my first as CFO. It's an exciting time at EA and a transformative period for our industry. Today, I'll delve into our journey. I'll reflect on where we've been, where we are today, and explore where we're headed within this transformative phase in our industry. Eight years ago, at our last Investor Day, we outlined our plan for long-term value creation amidst the industry's transition from package to digital. We shared a growth strategy centered on new business opportunities, digitally connected and evergreen live services, and player engagement through a persistent and robust player network, and that evolution introduced a new strategy for us: live services. Not only did we lead through this transformation, we laid an incredible foundation for the future.
Our business evolved from 55% digital to 90% digital. Our live services and other net bookings have experienced remarkable growth, more than doubling from $2.3 billion to $5.4 billion. This represents 73% of our total net bookings and a double-digit compound annual growth rate. Live services provide a crucial platform for delivering recurring revenue through a variety of monetization strategies while fostering brand affinity and continuous long-term engagement. These services enable us to scale our content delivery, reduce acquisition costs, and minimize churn. To meet the evolving needs of a global live service business, we invested in our teams, added new capabilities to our organization, and expanded our global footprint. We now have over 13,700 employees in over 25 studios across more than 20 countries.
We've evolved from making games to crafting experiences and entertainment that drives deeper engagement, connects our communities, and inspires creativity. Live Services have transformed the way we develop for our players. Over the last eight years, our teams have more than doubled the amount of content offerings we deliver. And as a result, we have witnessed significant growth in our player base. For example, Madden NFL players have increased by nearly 50%, while The Sims community has grown more than eightfold. Let's look at FY 2024. We delivered over 8,000 content offerings across our portfolio. For example, in EA Sports, this led to a 22% year-over-year increase in weekly active users. Our intentional focus on delivering fun gameplay, real-world connection, and compelling live content year-round is foundational to driving deeper engagement, expanding our communities as we build platforms in and around our games.
Offering more content to engage players for longer periods across a diverse set of experiences has created a more resilient business. The result of this live service strategy has been undeniable. We have achieved disciplined growth and strong, consistent cash flow. Over the last eight years, we've regularly delivered record free cash flow and returned over $8 billion to stockholders, and our execution has translated to a return on invested capital of 17%, a strong result amongst our gaming, media, and entertainment peers. Reflecting on where we've been, we have fundamentally transformed our business and financials through higher net bookings and greater consistency in our results. As we stand here today, we're incredibly well-positioned to leverage this strong foundation amidst the ongoing structural shifts occurring in our industry, and games continue to evolve: more social, more connected, and broader in their experience offerings.
The largest franchises are getting bigger and consumer expectations are expanding. It's not just about escape or competition, it's about social connection, self-expression, and building networks and habits rooted in their favorite experiences with friends and family. These industry shifts have been occurring for the last few years, and we were proactive in identifying these structural changes and transforming our business. Three years ago, we introduced our strategic pillars, and our investments behind these strategic pillars are beginning to yield results. We have successfully executed one of the most significant rebrands in entertainment history with EA Sports FC. In FY 2024, the FC experience reached a peak of 21 million weekly active users. Madden NFL 24 was the highest-selling installment for the franchise since the early 2000s and delivered record net bookings for the year, and we just delivered a record launch for EA Sports College Football 25.
We've been intentional to provide more transparent and effective communication with our external stakeholders as we embark on this journey. We introduced our long-term financial framework, which included our new non-GAAP operating margin guidance through FY 2027. In addition, we announced an enhanced stock repurchase program for the next three years, which we began executing last quarter, and today we're here to provide further insight into our strategic vision, and while today is intended to be about our long-term value creation, I'd like to provide a quick update on the quarter and fiscal year. Our American football business is delivering well above our expectations, and the football season has only just begun. Season 22 of Apex Legends introduced a new battle pass mechanic.
While our decision to extend free access to the pass has improved player sentiment following our initial announcement, it will not meet our financial expectations for the quarter. Today, the second half of that season launches with a premium pass, and our teams are closely monitoring its reception and performance. Looking ahead, we are eagerly anticipating the launch of EA Sports FC 25 next week and Dragon Age: The Veilguard in October, and both are currently tracking within expectations, and as of today, we're on track towards the high end of our Q2 and FY 2025 net bookings guidance. So far, we've covered where we've been and where we are. Now, let me talk about where we're headed. As we build for our future, we operate through a consistent set of financial principles. First, we're focused on delivering growth across our business at scale.
We'll reach more players in more ways for more time, delivering greater lifetime value as a result. Second, we'll expand our operating margins through a combination of both top-line growth and operational leverage. And third, we'll be deliberate in how we prioritize and allocate our capital to execute our strategic vision. Operating with these three principles at our core will bolster our strong financial foundation and realize long-term value. Let's dive into our first core financial principle: delivering growth at scale. The expansion of play drives deeper social connections and the aggregation of communities at scale. These communities drive significant future growth opportunities. Bringing together what we shared earlier today, we're investing in massive online community across three of the most compelling gaming categories: sports, first-person shooters, and simulation. These categories boast pivotal characteristics that amplify our growth strategy....
They represent significant scale, collectively capturing over $25 billion in annual spend in the Western HD and core mobile markets. And they engage a significant share of attention, concentrated around well-established IP and large communities. EA's core experiences and portfolio of IP are exceptionally aligned with these categories and characteristics. We believe that over the next three years, we'll have six massive online communities in the market: EA Sports FC, American Football, Apex Legends, Battlefield, The Sims, and Skate. These communities will unlock significant value through network effects and economies of scale through play, create, watch, and connect. In sports, we believe we can continue to scale our EA Sports FC and American football franchises. Our successful launch of college football marks the first step in creating a connected American football experience, and we expect that business to deliver over $1 billion in net bookings in FY 2025.
First-person shooter communities are among the largest in entertainment. As you heard earlier, both Battlefield and Apex Legends continue to engage large communities. We firmly believe that Battlefield and Apex Legends position EA to be a leader in the category. Switching to simulation, we see immense potential as we reintroduce Skate, and as you heard from EA Entertainment, we have an incredible roadmap for The Sims. We believe we can more than double The Sims franchise in the next five years, and we look forward to Skate coming to early access in twenty twenty-five. An important element of scaling our massive online communities is being able to reach and acquire new players. Mobile represents an integral element of our strategy to expand acquisition to hundreds of millions of new players by penetrating new markets, extending the reach, and delivering new experiences to broader demographics.
Our mobile strategy is focused on leaning into massive online communities, investing behind concentrated bets on standalone titles with breakout hit potential, all while driving profitable growth. The success of EA Sports FC Mobile illustrates how this platform can expand our reach. The top five geographies show significant differentiation compared to HD, including territories such as Brazil, Turkey, and India, demonstrating our ability to penetrate new markets and scale our communities globally. In addition, mobile platforms can significantly extend and deepen player engagement, leading to greater monetization. As we shared earlier, EA Sports FC players who engage through the companion app spend approximately five times more. Building on the foundation of massive online communities, blockbuster storytelling also represents an incredible opportunity to scale.
We've shared exciting projects in our pipeline, showcasing how modern blockbuster storytelling captivates vast and passionate audiences and communities devoted to their favorite franchises, and we have a proven leader in delivering high-quality blockbuster experiences. We see tremendous potential in this category, with these franchises set to deliver significant long-term net bookings. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order has sold nearly as many copies in the years following its release as it did in year one. This ongoing success showcases how successful blockbuster IP can create engagement and value over the long term. We're focused on investing in our talented teams to deliver blockbuster and innovative storytelling through IP with scalable and transformative potential. EA Experiences highlighted the significant growth potential of our third pillar, which focus on new business opportunities in new GX, advertising, digital commerce, and of course, the EA Sports App.
We believe these natural extensions of our current business could substantially boost our recurring annual revenue from our massive online communities by deepening engagement, improving retention, and lowering the cost of player acquisition. Many of these opportunities will be net new and continue to push us towards platform economics and away from unit economics. Today, you heard about our three strategic pillars and how we plan to unlock value as we build experiences for our communities in, around, and beyond our games. And it's the first glimpse we're providing into our pipeline of experiences for the medium and long term, and into our early concepts for expanding into a new category of experiences through AI. With greater insight, our intention is to drive further conviction in our strategy and confidence in our ability to drive longer-term net bookings growth.
Given our start to FY 2025 and our confidence in the breadth of experiences we shared earlier today, we believe we can significantly outpace market growth through FY 2027, and we're excited about our third pillar's potential, offering new growth opportunities that will continue our momentum beyond FY 2027. I've discussed our strategy for increasing net bookings. Now, let me share how this impacts our operating margins. As a reminder, our margin guidance expansion framework for twenty-five to twenty-seven has the following considerations: First, we expense the majority of our R&D, which provides significant leverage as we deliver for our future pipeline. Our upcoming pipeline has a favorable mix of high-margin digital and owned IP. Expanding our communities drives greater leverage as we achieve scale. And finally, we remain disciplined and cost-effective in how we prioritize investments.
Looking beyond FY twenty-seven, we see opportunities to increase operating leverage by introducing new business models, while enhancing content delivery and developer productivity through tools, technology, and Gen AI . Our ability to scale our business and expand margins is supported by a disciplined approach to capital allocation. We prioritize our capital allocation through three lenses: organic growth, returning capital to our stockholders, and opportunistic M&A. First, we invest behind organic growth to ensure sustainable development and long-term value creation for our stockholders. We are investing behind growth, but not at any cost.
As we think about organic growth, we rigorously prioritize our investments through the following lenses: building communities in and around our games, scaling our capabilities through technology to increase development velocity, deliver unmatched player experiences, and drive future innovation, fostering deep partnerships and sponsorships to bring greater reach and authenticity to our brands, and placing strategic investments behind big bets for the future. We also prioritize returning capital to our stockholders, primarily through our stock repurchase program. We employ a rigorous approach to capital returns, which has resulted in us returning approximately 70% of our free cash flow over the past eight years, amounting to over $8 billion, offsetting dilution and reducing share count over 15%. We recently announced our enhanced stock repurchase program, which is $5 billion over three years, and we began executing this program last quarter.
We expect to return $1.5 billion in FY 2025, and we expect to scale our program as the business grows. And finally, we consider inorganic growth as a strategic component of our broader capital allocation framework, recognizing that external expansion can accelerate our growth trajectory. Maintaining a robust financial foundation and a strong balance sheet enables us to seize opportunities as they arise. Our core focus is on opportunities and partnerships that advance our strategic initiatives through tools, tech, talent, and IP. Our ability to be deliberate in how we allocate and prioritize our capital to our largest opportunities will, in turn, accelerate how we scale our business and expand margins. Before I wrap up, I'd like to emphasize the key financial highlights we've covered today. We expect our American football business to deliver over $1 billion of net bookings in FY 2025.
We are on track towards the high end of our Q2 and FY 2025 net bookings guidance. Through FY 2027, we believe we can significantly outpace market growth and drive margin expansion. With this growth, we plan to continue to scale our stock repurchase program through FY 2027. And finally, beyond FY 2027, new growth opportunities will continue our momentum. Throughout the day, we provided an in-depth look at the initiatives driving our three strategic pillars to accelerate growth in, around, and beyond gaming. And let me summarize our ambitions: continue to sustain growth in our sports franchises, deliver a modern-day blockbuster Battlefield experience, significantly expand The Sims franchise with the launch of The Sims Hub, innovate and transform blockbuster storytelling, unlocking new business and economic opportunities through our strategic third pillar, starting with the EA Sports App, and all of this fueled by our talent and technology.
In the coming years, I look forward to sharing the significant progress we will make in executing our roadmap. We have the right strategy, leaders, and teams to lead the future of entertainment. We'll engage more players for more time across more modes of play, and we deeply believe that the future of entertainment is interactive. Thank you for your time today and for your partnership and engagement with us. Now, we'll turn to Q&A, and we look forward to answering your questions.
Hey, thank you, everybody. Please stay in your seats. We'll be back right in a moment while we queue the questions and we set up for the question and answer session. Be right back. ... Thanks to those who have submitted questions, I really appreciate it. Again, I just want to thank everybody, and please welcome David, Laura, Andrew, Stuart, Cam, and Mihir. I really appreciate all your time. We've got a lot of questions, so I aggregated some of them, but I will try to get to everybody here. The first one is from Matt Costa at Morgan Stanley. I think, Andrew, you start first, and then David, you can follow. What are the business opportunities around the EA Sports App? What's the strategy?
And then is it primarily about deepening engagement with brands, or are there direct monetization options, like in-app purchases or ads?
Great question. Thanks, Matt. You know, I think we're in this incredible position right now. We already have nearly 300 million people playing our sports games on a regular basis and engaging deeply in them. What they're asking us for is for us to do more for them beyond the bounds of our games, and what we know to be true, we do that now with our partner applications, whether it's in Madden or FC. Not only do we get more engagement from those that interact with those applications, but they also monetize at a significantly higher level.
As we think about the EA Sports App, the ability for us to seed that application with nearly 300 million active, engaged players is a profound opportunity that we almost certainly believe will drive higher engagement in our games, and follow on from that, higher monetization. But as big an opportunity, maybe even a bigger opportunity, we believe, is that given the changing nature of the consumption of sport, our ability to deliver a truly interactive form of sports fandom, we can attract hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions more sports fans around the world, who come to fulfill their needs and motivations around their sports fandom, and live out that fandom as part of that application.
And once you get to a point where you now have the nearly 300 million people that we currently have, plus hundreds of millions of more people around the world, engaging meaningfully on a daily basis in and around the, the EA Sports App, that almost certainly represents net new business opportunities. And so I'd let David answer a little bit more on how we think about that.
Yeah, Andrew, I mean, I think job one is always to build the community, and as Andrew said, we start from a very enviable position. And as you said, we see a much bigger audience. As we think about the monetization specifically, as we build the community, I referenced a little bit, I gave a taste of it today, certainly advertising and sponsorships, absolutely. We definitely see contextual commerce as something as we innovate over time. Significant opportunity, larger opportunity in contextual commerce. Gamification, something we know about from our, obviously from our games. You know, it's the core, it's the DNA of the company. Gamification within the app will absolutely be part of the experience. I just... I really want to hit the nail on the head of what Andrew is saying. We start with an amazing audience.
We know there is a much broader audience, and we know that we can bring unique capabilities to disrupt and do something that does not exist in the marketplace. That's going to be the cornerstone of how we build this community, on the shoulders of the incredible strength of our sports business today.
Thanks, David. Thanks, Andrew. Building on the EA Sports topic, Cam, we had dozens of questions come in on FC, specifically, how it plays a role in kind of doubling the player base and sustaining the growth that we announced today across EA Sports. So could you just kind of talk about the socialization impact that FC has?
Yeah, sure. I, you know, I talked today about the impact that we can have by building out massive online communities by really treating them as connected ecosystems. So connecting those communities across different modalities of play, across platforms, geographies, including, you know, low-barrier business models, it allows us to access a far wider reaching fan base all over the world, with different experiences that can suit the motivations of many more sports fans and many more players. We do that, and then, as I mentioned today, invest in tools for the community to actually create content and feed that community as well.
So we have a community-led, massive community, all connected with new modalities of play, and when you added things like the new social experiences that we're building, yes, that's to satisfy the motivations of particularly with younger sports fans, who not only like to play games and compete in games with their friends, but they also like to use games as social spaces, like third spaces, where they hang out with their friends. So meeting those motivations, along with connecting all the experiences as ecosystems, and then giving the creator tools to make them community-led, and then we get those network effects that help drive the collective community, that's how we're going to double our engaged player base in the next five years.
Got it. Thank you. Next question for Laura on Battlefield. Chris Schoell at UBS: "How are you thinking about the opportunity for Battlefield relative to prior iterations of the franchise, and how do you balance affording your development teams longer lead times to make sure quality is high and timeliness of getting your game to market?
Yeah, great question, and it's... We don't think it's ever been a better time to be looking at the potential for the Battlefield franchise right now. You heard from Byron today about the level of engagement that we have in the community, so-
Interest and demand is really strong, remains strong. And we have an incredibly strong leadership team, the strongest leadership team that we've ever have had on the Battlefield franchise. We have four studios instead of one working on it, so we know that we are really investing in the right places. And the most interesting thing really is that the market has evolved and changed, the shooter category has. And, you know, things like players having agency over their gameplay, players wanting to engage in these massive scaled battles. We have vehicles. And you think about that, with the, where the market's gone, and then what the strengths of Battlefield really are, it's like this perfect match.
So we know that if we continue to invest in the opportunity with the strong leadership team we have, the great brand we have, the core tenets and strengths of the game leaning into where the market is going, we know we have a significant opportunity on our hands to really realize the full potential of the Battlefield brand.
Thank you, Laura. It wouldn't be an investor day without a question from the CFO. Stuart, we did update our guidance today with coming at the high end of the range for both fiscal Q2 and fiscal 2025. Can you just talk about the puts and takes of landing there?
Yeah, I mean, first of all, the intention of today, our first investor day in eight years, was to really try and lay the path for our long-term value creation framework. As we've started out in the last few quarters, we always want to be intentional and transparent about our financial framework and progress. Given that, we did provide an update today, that we are currently at the high end of our range, both Q2 and FY 2025. And let me take a few steps on some of the framework and the building principles around as we see it today. First, we've had a great first half of the year. We've shown incredible strength in our live services and through our American football franchise. We did note earlier today that we continue to see Season 22 and Apex be a little bit soft on monetization.
However, we are launching the new second half of the season today, and we're monitoring that performance through the rest of the quarter and through the season. But more importantly, we have over half our business still to go. We wait for EA Sports FC, that's due out in a week now. We have Dragon Age: The Veilguard still to come in end of October, and we also have an unannounced title still sitting out in Q4. So given that, we reiterated the range to give transparency and where we're sitting today, and we look forward to coming back on our earnings call on October 29th with further updates on that.
Thanks, Stuart. Andrew and Mihir, we got a lot of questions on AI today. So I'll just... I'm gonna try to summarize all of them into a couple here. Andrew, kind of talk first about how AI's impacted the pace of product development. How do you think about efficiencies from AI? And then we've also got a lot of questions about some of the more transformative things. So kind of talk about our philosophy there, and then, Mihir, why don't you follow up with kind of talking about the difference between expansion and transformation? That was, I think that was kind of lost in a lot of the questions.
Great. You know, it's still incredibly early in this AI journey, at least this latest incarnation of the AI journey. And from our vantage point, the progress is almost certainly going to be nonlinear. We see tremendous progress made in certain aspects, on what feels like an almost weekly or daily basis. But then the broader commercial application of those advancements seems like it's gonna be meaningfully further out. As we look at our business, we've already seen real impact. A significant portion of our QA is now done with AI. We're now seeing impacts in the creation pipelines. We talked a lot about, you know, College '25. The ability to get 150 stadiums and 11,000 player heads into the game at that level of quality just would not have been possible.
And so we're already starting to see this, and when you see what's happening, you know, in Laura's organization and what's happening in our central tech organizations, while it is still early, while AI is having impacts on our processes already, while AI is allowing us to do more things in-game that we would otherwise be able to do, both efficiently and in expansion of our products, we think we're just getting started, and we think there's meaningful opportunities ahead, albeit nonlinear in nature.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and to just build on Andrew's answer, I think first, as it relates to expansion versus transformation, the way you might want to think about it is expansion is really about expanding the color palette, you know, that painters have when they, you know, paint games, and also to expand the canvas that they can paint on. Transformation is fundamentally about entirely new types of games and experiences, things that don't exist today. And we think there's meaningful opportunity when it comes to transformation in the context of our industry. Our, you know, view and strategy when it comes to really harnessing this transformative potential of AI, it's really anchored on three core beliefs. I think, one, it's about the fact that AI might be the biggest macro catalyst in history. Two, AI will certainly unlock new categories of entertainment.
And three, AI will extend and amplify massive online communities and blockbuster stories. I'll take a second to unpack each one of these beliefs. This notion of AI is a great macro catalyst. You know, when we look back over the last twenty years, we can't help but notice that global equity markets have nearly tripled in value on the back of the Internet and conversion technologies like the smartphone and the cloud. And when we look forward, we can think of AI as a similar technological super cycle. You know, it might have even more value, even faster.
And as a company that really built on the Internet and led many internet-enabled transitions for the last twenty years, including the shift from single player to multiplayer, offline to online, physical to digital, we feel really good about our ability to build on this next wave and lead the next set of transitions. And we think one of the most, you know, incredible set of transitions will be around these new categories of entertainment. I briefly alluded to this in the presentation, but whenever we see technologies like generative AI, like the internet, like the printing press, any great technology come into contact with media and entertainment in history, we've seen new forms of entertainment emerge, and we think this time is no different. But what might be different this time around is that these new forms of entertainment are more likely to be interactive than passive and linear.
And so in that context, we think there's gonna be disproportionate benefit to the top purveyors of interactive entertainment, at least those that are experimenting and at the forefront of innovation. And this is the third belief, you know, it's perhaps the most counterintuitive. It's not uncommon to view entertainment sometimes as zero-sum, but we don't believe these new categories of entertainment have to come at the expense of, you know, existing categories of entertainment. And the simple reason is, you know, when you think about AI, and you think about the fact that it's inevitably gonna unleash a volume of content in the world, an exponential growth in the volume of content, there's gonna be more choice available to consumers than ever before.
In a sea of choice, in a sea of fragmentation, the question remains, you know, what is scarce in a world of abundance? We realize that in that context, those top franchises with big IPs, strong network effects, massive online communities, blockbuster content at their core, they stand to benefit 'cause they stand even taller in the sea of fragmentation. As a company with, you know, several of the largest massive online communities in the world, a history of blockbuster storytelling, we feel really good. I'll summarize, you know, our view and strategy as it relates to transformation and harnessing the transformative potential of AI is, you know, anchored on three beliefs: AI is a great macro catalyst, it will unlock new categories of entertainment, and it will extend and amplify massive online communities and blockbuster stories.
Great. Thank you, Mihir. Thank you, Andrew. Cam, a question from Brian Pitz at BMO: Given the strong success you have seen from the return of the college football franchise, would you provide us an update on what you were seeing on both college football and Madden, how they coexist together?
Yeah, so today I talked about how we set out to build the interactive epicenter of American football, so everything from how we designed the game and implemented the game, to how we're designing and implementing Live Services, to even the commercial strategies we're using to drive the business this year and drive people in. These games are built so that you can go back and forth between them, take your progress with you from one game to the next. Live Services that will reward you and engage you for playing in both games. The games are different, but there are enough similarities that players can go back and forth between them. Our goal this year was to get as many football fans to just come in and enter our ecosystem and play with us.
And the amazing thing right now, obviously, college has gotten off to such an incredible start. We've got more American football players in our ecosystem, playing our experiences, engaging in our live services, than we actually ever had dreamed to have at this point in the season, and the football season's just started. We've got the entirety of the college football and NFL seasons ahead of us, with decades of experience of just driving players' engagement and acquisition through all of the beats of the football calendar through the season. I could not be more excited, and we are in an incredible position. Stuart talked about some of the numbers that we're seeing and that we expect to do in American football this year.
It's gonna be a really strong story for us, and not only that, like I said, we've got the whole football season ahead of us to drive as many players into both games as we possibly can.
Great. Thanks, Cam.
Yeah.
Question for Laura from Colin Sebastian at Baird: For more context on doubling The Sims business, can you please provide a sense of how much of that growth is monetization coming from new services such as UGC, user economy, commerce, versus kind of the core live services and traditional game sales?
Yeah, you know, it's such a I love our strategy because it's not any one thing, it's actually the multiplier effect of many things. And so we talked today about building this massive online creator gaming platform for teens and women and creators around the world, and we're doing that by not taking Sims 4 away. We're actually gonna build and expand Sims 4. So all the content we talked about today stays with the franchise. We're building a whole new technology base, and we will continue to put assets out against this franchise. The second part is we were gonna release a whole new Sims experience that will have socialization, creators can connect with each other and create together like they never have before. Then you layer in MySims for new generations, the cozy game.
And it's not just for new generations, it also will have a significant reach and impact in Asian markets as well. And then we talked about the new mobile platform, shared stories across the whole universe of Sims. So you take all those things together, and you create this sense of place and almost a portal where players can come in with multiple experiences, and then you connect them with common creator tools, a common marketplace, common social environment for players to join and connect and share and talk. And you have this incredible ecosystem and flywheel effect of players coming together. Then you layer a movie on top of that, and you accelerate and expand. So we will expand our addressable market. We will have reach in all markets around the globe.
We will have new players coming in, thanks to this incredible reach of the movie. And not to mention, we will actually be able to amplify that movie in ways that have never been seen before. So we have this incredible game and platform that players are gonna be engaged on, that we've talked about. And then when a movie comes out, we will be able to reach those players, talk with them, interact with them, and connect them back to the movie as well. So we're super optimistic and excited about the strategy we have and the work that the teams are doing. And we've, I know we've talked a lot about AI, and I shared just a few of the things that they're doing, and there's just so much more.
It's just, it's such an optimal time right now for this, for this product and the brand and where the market sits today, and how the product and the experiences really meet the motivations and demands in the market, so we're really excited about the potential, and it will come from all of these things.
Great. Thank you, Laura. I'm gonna try to get us back on schedule because we have a lot of cool things to show downstairs, so I'll do three more questions. The next one is for David, then I'll go to Stuart, and then I'll go to Andrew to wrap. David, we got a lot of questions, and I'm gonna put them all kind of in one here around advertising. Kind of a direct question, but how is EA gonna avoid kind of the previous pitfalls that we've seen in gaming around advertising, and its disruption of kind of the quality player experience? And then, two, can you kind of elaborate more on the advertising opportunities you mentioned beyond our games?
Yeah, I think it's a two-part conversation. One is around surfaces, and one is around, as we talked about today, formats or inventory. I think, you know, our strategy, as we've outlined and discussed today, really talks about a business that is going across more and more surfaces, right? So we talked about the in, around, and beyond game opportunities. When we talk about the inventory that we think is very relevant, that I see a very clear line to value on, it does cut across, you know, scale through programmatic advertising, sponsorships, partnerships, et cetera, and then contextual commerce a little bit further out.
So when you overlay, you know, kind of the vectors of our surfaces that we're building experiences on and the type of inventory we can provide, we do see beyond game opportunities as the big ones. We see, and we talked about some of the experiences we're looking to build. We see it has a clear line to value, clear line to value for, for consumers, for brands, et cetera. I do think, you know, we've got a very hard line, a very hard line when it comes to our premium experiences. We're not creating disruptive formats. We will exclusively look at how you add realism and authenticity to the experience. You know, we're seeing it right now. We see it in college football. We're seeing. You'll see it in FC 25.
You know, very realistic, very, adding authenticity to the experience with geo-targeted ad board placements around the pitch. It's a completely non-disruptive experience. It adds complete value and realism and authenticity to the world of football. So we see it's just a very straight line from my standpoint as we look at both the surfaces and the inventory, the creative inventory, and we find the sweet spot in the middle as the business evolves.
Got it. Thank you, David. Stuart, Eric Sheridan at Goldman has an interesting question about our long-term growth targets: "In terms of thinking about the compounded growth above market levels that we gave, can you go deeper into the key drivers, such as how much is driven by content pipeline or some of the longer-term opportunities that we discussed today?
Sure. Thanks, Eric. First of all, we're incredibly convicted on our long-term strategy, and the intent and purpose of today was to continue to be transparent and share all those initiatives with all of you. I hope you take away a couple of things that we shared today. First, we did announce that 2025-2027, we do expect to accelerate net bookings growth faster than market growth. Two, this leadership team across here shared the significant scale and scope of the IP that we bring to market in order to accelerate and drive those initiatives. The important part I think you've heard, and Mihir touched on it earlier, is that massive online communities, in particular, drive incredible opportunity to amplify our strategy and growth.
Massive online communities, and Mihir talked to some of the pieces today, are structurally advantaged through scale and network effects, and more importantly, an ever-increasing fragmented world bring compelling value. From the scale of experiences to engaging more players for more time and their attentive capacity capture far more value. If you think about all of the things that we put together in that near term, 2025-2027, Cam talked to the growth and compelling sports business we have today and how we sustain and accelerate that in the future. He talked through connected modalities of play, social connection, and tools for creators. Laura talked to the modern-day blockbuster Battlefield experience. We announced the early access with Skate next fall. We also talked about a more expansive Sims platform, and of course, interspersed with innovative blockbuster storytelling.
And as you think about beyond FY 2027, we also talked with David, the experiences of harnessing the power of our community in and around our games. When you put all of that together, and you add two other important concepts, one is we continue to be very disciplined in how we manage our capital and resource allocation, insofar as making sure all of this leadership team have the ability to continue to invest and drive our strategy. And second, we know that both technology and talent, in particular, are the core and heart of a competitive advantage that EA carries today. We'll use technology to accelerate and expand in the near term, ultimately be more transformative in the long term.
All of those pieces will ultimately mean that we drive greater cash flow and ultimately greater return to our stockholders, and we want to make sure that we'll be continuing to update all of you as we continue on this journey.
Thanks, Stuart. Last question, and this one's for you, Andrew, because I think it's a really good one. It's from Martin Yang at Oppenheimer: "As EA expands into areas outside of gaming, is there a company or business model that you would compare yourself to? Or put another way, who do you see as our true competitor?
Wow, great question. Thank you. You know, I might think about that. I might unpack that a little differently. So if you think about what we've shared with you today, we shared an incredible pipeline of games and experiences across both sports and entertainment that are fundamentally changing the way these games experiences are played and meaningfully expanding what players and fans can do inside of those experiences across play, create, watch, and connect, all four modalities of engagement.
We talked about how we will serve that community, that growing global gaming community, beyond the bounds of our games, and attract net new audiences with net new experiences, like the EA Sports App, like what we're doing with the Creator Economy across The Sims, to change the way people interact with each other and the content that we create, and the things that are most meaningful to them while they're not playing games. As a company at the leading edge of technology for the 40 years of its life, we are harnessing the power of this latest technology to truly transform and shape the future of entertainment itself, and the consumption of sport and entertainment for a new generation in a new world over the coming years and decades.
And so as I think about that, I'm not actually sure who's out there doing what we're doing in the context of sport and entertainment in our current context. I'm not sure who's out there actually expanding how they serve these global communities and fulfill their needs and motivations beyond the bounds of games. And I don't know of another entertainment company out there who truly has the experience, and the capability, and the power to harness this latest technology to truly transform the nature of how the shape of sport and entertainment is consumed in the future. And also, too, as I look across this stage, I'm not sure that there's a company out there with a better management team. And I'm proud to sit with this group today, and I hope you've enjoyed spending time with us.
Again, it's not that we don't think about competitors, we do every day. We are hyper-focused on delivering for our fans, we're hyper-focused on delivering the future of entertainment, and we're hyper-focused on all of those who would seek to compete with us. I'm just not sure anyone has what we have and can do what we can do, and for that, that makes us incredibly excited for our future.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, that's our ambition. It is bold. It is daunting, as I said earlier. But for us, it may be the most exciting opportunity we've ever had, and the most exciting time to be part of Electronic Arts and doing what we do.
Great, thanks. Why don't you take the close as well?
So with that, I'd say thank you everyone for being here. We have shared a lot with you today, and we will have a great deal more to share in the future. Today is just the start of our conversation, and about the future of entertainment, and how we look forward to continuing it with you in the coming weeks and months to come. Before we close out the presentation, I want to take a moment to thank all our amazing teams for their passion, determination, and creativity, with a special shout-out to everyone that worked tirelessly to build out this Investor Day. Thank you very much!