During its quarterly financial conference call, EA has revealed that it believes that single-player games are an important part of the company’s offerings, according to Twinfinite.
EA CEO Andrew Wilson spoke about how single-player games are an important part of the company’s strategy to help grow its network and improve the time players spend with EA’s games.
“The way we think about this is really less about which game, and more about which motivations that these games fulfill,” said Wilson. “So we know that our players have these core motivations, inspiration, escape, social connection competition, self-improvement, and creation. These things that bring us together as players of games and the creation of worlds and the building of characters, and the telling of stories is really important in the fulfillment of some of those motivations.”
Despite single-player games being important to EA’s strategies, however, the company still plans to focus on live service games. EA CFO Chris Suh states that live service games still make up the bulk of EA’s revenue.
“Andrew here explained it well, but as we think about the model impact in the financial impact of that, the first thing to always keep in mind is that Live Services still encompasses, on a trailing 12 month basis, over 70% of our business, and that has been a proven, very reliable, highly recurring revenue stream and that will still be the predominant driver in our PNL [Profit and Loss] long-term,” said Suh.
“And so over the course of time, we’ll continue to invest… our long-term growth will continue to invest in the ongoing, stable performance of our Live Services business and there’ll be some puts and takes along the way.”
EA has come under fire in the past for down-playing the role single-player games have played in the industry. For a while, the company had begun to focus heavily on its multiplayer offerings, likely due to better chances for recurring sources of revenue.
For what it’s worth, the company has been expanding its efforts in the single player space of late, following in the footsteps of 2019’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order with the likes of its sequel, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and the upcoming Dead Space remake, while recent leak also claimed that an EA studio is working on a single player open world Black Panther game.