Andrew Uerkwitz: Thanks for taking the question. I just have one short-term, one long-term question. On the short-term side, you called out Apex weakness here quite substantially in your prepared remarks, but you kept your full year guide. Is something else kind of making up for it? Or is the weakness just not that bad? But just any comment there on how to reconcile the comments around Apex and the yearly guide.
Andrew Wilson: Yes. So first, let me talk about Apex a little bit, and Laura can probably even provide some more detail. Again, this is — this extraordinary franchise, which has continued to grow and is one of the great franchise in our industry right now, and has its ebbs and flows, and we’ve seen its ebbs and flows. And again, if I go back to my previous comment, as a company that has been running live services at scale now for nearly two decades, we launched our first live service with FIFA Online back in 2006, we’ve seen these ebbs and flows in and around our live services. And certainly, we’ve seen that in the context of Apex. And so we come off a record-level Season 16, the team made some really interesting and creative and innovative changes in 17.
That didn’t meet our expectations. It’s also relevant to note that we went into a very competitive quarter. We — a few things are happening now. One is the team has worked diligently to make very quick changes and respond to community feedback and community reaction and the performance of Season 17, and we’re already starting to see momentum as we go through our current quarter. But this is the nature of our business today is that we will continue to innovate at the very cutting edge of entertainment. Many of those things will work. And by virtue of the collective learning of our organization, we will almost certainly learn faster than others in the industry. But that doesn’t mean that there won’t be some ebbs and flows. And as we think about the long-term day of the franchise, we factor that in.
Andrew Uerkwitz: Got it. That’s helpful.
Laura Miele: Thank you, Andrew, for the question. Just to add on to what Andrew was saying, I think he covered it well, as far as how we think about live services, experimentation, learning and responding to players. We also — as we talked about in the opening statement, we have one of the most premier shooter developers in Respawn and in our ability and their strength in optimizing for the shooter audience. That huge strength we have has also provided a pretty significant opportunity for us as we think about new game modes and more accessibility for a broader player base. So think about us being incredibly strong with core shooter players. Again, 18 million active monthly players, over 70% retention, and we have a runway with more players around the world as the team thinks about more accessible modes, bringing in things such as bots to help new player experience and first-time player experiences.
So there’s a big focus on that. The second area, I would say, on Apex that the team is really focused on is just the geographic expansion. So we’ve had strong success in North America and Asia, and we were going to continue to evolve our strength there and look at culturalization, marketing areas of focus in other parts of the world to continue our growth. So again, good success and then more to come in that area. And then — and we have opportunity in the third part of monetization and converting within the game play still. So even though we’re 17 seasons in and 4.5 years in, we still see opportunity on monetization in areas such as IP integration, brand partnerships, evolving some of these heirlooms we have for the legends are specific to individual legends and we are looking at creating opportunities for these heirlooms and artifacts to span across all legends to appeal to broader players.
