But you’ve also called out a bunch of other things, Star Wars Jedi coming to prior-gen consoles. I’m not sure if that’s this year or further out. You talked about The Sims parallel experience. I think we’ve got a FIFA Mobile major update coming later this year. So I guess just outside the frontline release, like any other ebbs and flows that we should be cognizant of for the back half of the year? Thanks, everyone.
Andrew Wilson: Yes, great question. I would think about this probably in three buckets. The first is the launch went incredibly well. And certainly, that was the first moment we talked about FC. We’ve been building towards this for some time and working incredibly closely with our partners in a very directly connected way with our global community across console, across PC, across mobile, across geographies. So the launch went incredibly well and was nearly double the positive performance of the launch versus FIFA 23, which in and of itself had achieved some records in terms of its launch awareness and its launch access. So our expectation there is very, very strong that we’ve hit the right tone. We’ve built incredible relationships with partners so that we have all of the right license content.
Everything we had before, plus more. We’ve got game teams across console, PC and mobile that are all innovating at the very front-line to make sure that this is not just a change of symbol, but it is, in fact, a symbol of change. And so if I combine what’s happening with — what happened at the launch and the feedback and performance of that with what we’re doing in the game, we feel very good about that element. The second element I would point you towards is just the performance of the franchise broadly. We’ve highlighted this many times before. One of the greatest predictors of future success is both recency and depth of engagement. And on both of those fronts, the existing franchise continues to perform exceptionally well. Again, what we said in the script was it just had its second record quarter in a row.
And even as typically you would see that starting to wane as there’s not much going on in the world of football right now, at least cup football but for the Women’s World Cup, which is doing great things in Australia, New Zealand, we would typically start to see the business wane at this point. And we’re not — we’re seeing still really strong engagement and regular engagement from our community. And so that in and of itself is probably one of the greatest predictors of future success. And then third, as we highlighted in the script, we’ve got a giant marketing budget against this. If you’re on mobile or PC free-to-play, you will wake up and your existing experience will now be FC, and you will get all of the new benefits of that. And if you’re on console, we’re going to be spending a meaningful amount of money.
Certainly, more than we ever have done before. We are taking no risk on that front to make sure everybody that loves football in the world understands what FC is, how it applies to them and that it’s coming in September. And so net of all of that, I think that if you take into account our launch, plus the quality of the games that we’re making across platforms, you take into account the current engagement and recency and regularity of that engagement, and you take into account that we are literally rallying the entire company behind this launch more than we ever have in the 40-years of the company’s history around any launch, we feel very good about it.
