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发帖数: 1034 | 1 Executive VP Frank Gibeau explains how EA Mobile generated almost $500M in
revenue in 2014
January 30, 2015 7:00 AM
Dean Takahashi
Electronic Arts once had the pole position in mobile games, particularly
after it acquired Jamdat Mobile for $680 million in 2005 and got the rights
to the mobile game version of Tetris. But in the age of smartphones, EA
competes against rivals like Supercell, King, Machine Zone, Kabam, and
GungHo Entertainment. These newcomers have dominated the mobile gaming
charts, and EA hasn’t been able to keep up, even with a portfolio of more
than 800 games.
Frank Gibeau
Above: Frank Gibeau
Image Credit: Dean Takahashi
But the big game publisher’s financial results for third fiscal quarter
show that the company has made strides in converting its business from
premium sales to live services based on the free-to-play business model,
said EA Mobile head Frank Gibeau in an interview with GamesBeat.
“The digital transformation we have been on for the last several years is
complete,” Gibeau said. “The business is operating on digital fundamentals
that are exciting. In mobile, we’ve been on a journey for a year and a
half. And at Christmas, we turned a corner. What we have in front of us is
pretty exciting.”
Madden, FIFA Soccer, and SimCity: Build It helped push EA to 161 million
monthly active users in December and a daily active user high of 35 million
on Dec. 28. To date, EA has had more than 2 billion mobile game downloads (
since the start of the App Store), and the overall business hit $497 million
for the trailing 12 months through Dec. 31. The games are now built from
the ground up for live services, which are continuously updated with new
content so that users keep coming back. EA now has a strong engagement and
monetization equation, Gibeau said.
“The conversion to live services has been liberating,” Gibeau said. “We
go into a soft launch. We listen to our players, make the adjustments and
come out at the right time.”
In Madden, EA embraced Ultimate Teams and the notion that sports has to be
real time. With Madden, EA issues daily quests and challenges. Madden is up
45 percent in active players from a year ago, and revenues are up hundreds
of percent.
SimCity: Build It has crafting elements, a cool 3D graphics engine, and all
of the elements that players expect from building games, Gibeau said. People
downloaded it more than 22 million times in a month.
EA streamlined the installation size of its games (smaller is better), and
it shortened the session length for its games to suit people on the run.
During December, EA had four of the top 20 grossing iOS games. Those
included the aging appa like The Simpsons: Tapped Out and The Sims Free Play.
Gibeau also said that EA doesn’t have as tough a problem with user
acquisition as other mobile game companies do because its well-known brands
are natural attractions for players.
“We don’t have to spend tens of millions of dollars on campaigns to bring
people into the games,” he said.”Between our network power, the games, and
our brands, we are bringing people in with a low marketing spend, much
lower than the competition.”
Gibeau also said that EA isn’t spending a ton on human resources. Its teams
are up to 40 people, on average, for the creation of mobile games, Gibeau
said. The Madden team is in the low 20s, the SimCity team was about 35
people, and the FIFA team was in the 20s. Part of the reason for this is
that they can use some of the assets from the console teams.
“The number of about 40 developers feels right,” Gibeau said. “We don’t
have any 80-person mobile teams. We think we are a long way away from having
our mobile teams match the number of developers on the console game teams.”
As for its competitors, Gibeau said EA has a lot of respect for them. EA
bought a lot of companies in the past, but it has digested them now, and it
isn’t really looking for big acquisitions now. But Gibeau said the company
is always on the hunt for talent.
“We want to be the No. 1 mobile game company, period,” he said. “
Mastering the premium live services is going to get us into the battle.”
The next big EA Mobile game will be Need for Speed: No Limits, which is in
its soft launch now. That is built from the ground up as a mobile, live-
service free-to-play game. It uses high-end rendering technology from the
Real Racing and Fire Monkey teams, and it takes advantage of Apple’s Metal
development platform, which reduces unnecessary computing overhead in a
mobile device.
“We’ll announce a slate of products for mobile in our next earnings call
that people will be excited about,” Gibeau said. |
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