They’re working diligently to offer new types of content and new types of mechanics into the game. And they’ve put tools in place to test those meaningfully to ensure that, both they’re enhancing gameplay. But also that they’re fulfilling the needs and motivations of the community. And I’m very encouraged by what we saw out of that collection event. And I’m very encouraged as we go into Season 20 and all the new and interesting things that the team’s doing.
Andrew Marok: Great. Thank you. You kind of led into what was going to be the next part of my question. So, we’ve seen Apex do some smaller crossover events in the past, but how did the FINAL FANTASY partnership specifically kind of come about? And with the increasing intent kind of in the rest of the states, as you hinted at for a lot of these cross media partnerships, how much room and intent, is there for more of these more substantial crossovers within Apex?
Andrew Wilson: Yes, I think we’re still learning and the team is now thinking through, what that might look like. Remember, Apex is this incredible game that has attracted hundreds of millions of people to play. That’s tremendous retention in its core. And underneath that core gameplay, which is incredible and what Respawn is known for, is also tremendously deep lore about who these characters are, where these characters come from, and how those characters interact in the world. And so, we have to be very thoughtful about any brand crossovers that we do, to make sure that we’re not impeding on the authenticity of the characters or the game in any way. What I think the Final Fantasy crossover did was actually open our eyes to the kinds of things that are possible, and the kind of things that will be super well received by our core fan base and new fans alike.
And how that lines up with the core law of the game. And so I would expect that we have more opportunities to do this in the future. But I would also expect that the team will continue to protect both the core game play, the core character set and the core law in the world, what this event does show is we have probably more ability to do things in that direction than we may have thought previously.
Katie Burke: Thank you. Operator, our last question, please.
Operator: Our last question comes from the line of Mike Hickey with Benchmark Company.
Michael Hickey: First question is kind of a challenge, Andrew, because it hasn’t been announced that we obviously have a fair amount of evidence that the switch to, from Nintendo should come out this year. And from what we know, it’s going to be a bigger display, more horsepower. It seems like it is something a platform that would better lend itself to your game. So in as much as you can sort of talk about an opportunity that’s not beneficially announced. Just curious if you think you can have more success on that sort of platform that seems better geared towards your games? The second one is sort of, it looks like ’25 is not calling an investment year, but most of the growth here is driven by your core games and Live Services.
But you look at your longer-term pipeline, you think about Battlefield, Mass Effect, Star Wars, obviously, you’ve been great in the action genre. I think you’re still developing a shooter from Respawn as well. [10 Street] to play maybe user-generated content, licensed properties like Ironman, Black Panther, I mean all of those seem feasible by fiscal ’27. So just sort of curious, I know you kind of talked about your longer-term growth opportunity in near term, you focused on leverage, but do you think you’re sort of in a position here in the next 2 years to sort of accelerate your top line growth just given how substantial your pipeline appears to be?
Andrew Wilson: Yes. A lot there, and you’re a little quiet at the beginning, but I think what you’re asking or was suggesting there has been some rumors that Nintendo was doing a new console, and to the extent that I’m able to comment on things that are not yet announced, do I think that might benefit our company and our portfolio? Again, I can absolutely not comment on anything that has not been announced or acknowledge it in any way. What I would say, though, is, to the extent that platforms over the course of the last 20 years have come out and offered improved CPU, GPU, memory, battery life, screen resolution, to the extent those things have happened, where we’re able to deliver more immersion for our players, particularly around our biggest franchises like FC, like Madden, like Battlefield, like Apex that has typically been very good for our business.
Our players’ ability to really experience our games at the highest level has typically worked out very well for us. And so without commenting at all on anything around Nintendo or the Switch, I would just say. New platforms are good for us, where new platforms offer improved CPU, GPU, memory, battery life, screen resolution that typically is a plus for our particular portfolio of games and the community that plays them.
Stuart Canfield: Mike, just to kind of tackle your second question. Let’s take ’25 first, a second, and I’ll build it back into the longer-term answer I gave before, and we prepared remarks on as well. So first on ’25. So I think the key here is we expect growth in our core business. We’re 73% Live Service and obviously have a consistent Full Game Sports release slate, plus we’ve talked to College coming in the summer next year in 2024. Second, we do have a lighter release slate, which obviously comps to a Star Wars launch and a more expansive sports like where we saw 8 titles released this year. And we’ve called out also that Battlefield is not in our FY ’25 outlook, third, we continue to drive leverage. And I’ll just point you to your question around sort of an investment year.
You can see sort of by the underlying profitability range that we are still getting scale and leverage by virtue of efficiencies in the business. But also continue to resource and reallocate against some of our bigger growth opportunities. The last one, obviously is just a reminder, we continue to expense costs. So we continue to build into that acceleration that flows into the longer term beyond FY ’25 that will be highly beneficial we think of operating leverage to some of the questions we’ve had earlier. So you kind of put that together. So FY ’25, obviously a core business growth. We’ll talk more about the details in our Q4 call, lighter slate ongoing scale and leverage from the core business itself and obviously, we expense as we go from an investment perspective.
We do expect to see for all the titles in terms of new releases, plus ongoing growth in our core business that we do believe we continue to get accretion and long-term growth and incremental cash flow that accelerates through those following years to the comments we laid out earlier.
