Andrew Wilson: Yes. Let me start there, and then Laura can come in and kind of share a little about how she’s thinking about the entertainment part of the company. Again, we’ve had this — we are in as a company, first and foremost, around our plays. We have over 700 million in our network, and they’re spending more and more time with us. And as we think about the future, serving those players in a world where they choose interactive entertainment as their first form of entertainment and they choose the games and experiences that they play as the number one way to connect and stay connected with their friends. And as we think about the future of entertainment, for us, when we drive towards entertaining and engaging that audience of 700 million that we hope grows well beyond 1 billion to 2 billion over the course of time, we wanted to really think about how best to serve those players.
And while we’re almost absolutely or certainly have crossover between players who play FC and Apex and Need for Speed and Madden, the nature of development and the nature of how those games are built and developed is very different and is getting more different as time passes. And what we wanted to get to as we continue to scale the company, as we continue to scale our franchises and scale the live services that are born from those franchises, get to a place where we were able to empower our creative leaders even more than we have been. We’ve been on a move over the last five or six years to really give more power to our creative leaders to build and grow and drive their businesses with the direct connection that they have with our players.
And we want — this was the very next evolutionary step in that process and really about giving them more creative autonomy, business autonomy as they are most deeply connected and directly connected to these networks of players and these communities of players that they play with. And it was really about getting to an accelerated level of decision-making and an accelerated level of development. I think we’re already starting to see the benefits of that. We’ve outlined our strategy very clearly. We believe that the future of entertainment is interactive. We believe that any large-scale entertainment company will need to understand and appreciate and be able to develop in the conduct of interactive entertainment for these audiences that are choosing what we do as their first form.
And as we think about that building out these platforms that deliver experiences and entertainment that entertain massive online communities, this ability to tell blockbuster interactive stories and its ability to harness the power of these communities not just inside the game, but outside the game, and as we look at what’s going on with FC right now, as we think about a reimagined Madden, as we think about the reemergence of college football and all that’s happening across our EA SPORTS portfolio, we’re seeing accelerated moves towards that. As I think about what’s happening in Laura’s organization and the speed at which the Respawn team has been able to respond in the context of what’s happening in Apex Season 17 as we move towards Apex Season 18, as we think about what’s happening for Battlefield and what’s happening for The Sims, I’m really excited, because I think we’re already seeing the clock speed of our organization increase.
And my sense is that will mean that we will build more things, better things, higher-quality things that entertain more people around the world over time.
