EA CEO Discusses Looming Recession Fears: No One Is Immune

The United States is already in the midst of, or is headed to, an economic recession, according to financial experts. It stands to reason that consumers might hold back spending on non-essentials these days. But Electronic Arts, one of the largest gaming publishers on Earth, isn’t seeing a negative impact as of yet in terms of consumer spending on video games.

As part of EA’s latest earnings call, CEO Andrew Wilson said the company continues to see “extraordinary engagement” across its entire business and particularly in major games like FIFA, Apex Legends, and The Sims.

“As it stands right now, we haven’t seen meaningful shifts in behavior,” Wilson said. “We expect that we will grow but we also want to be very thoughtful, focused, and deliberate as we move through this environment because if it gets really bad, I don’t think anybody is immune. But I think what we’ve demonstrated is that we’re unbelievably resilient and why we’re focused on building incredible games and driving deep engagement with our community, which so far is working really, really well for us.”

Wilson went on to say that EA plans to be “very deliberate” in its strategy in the time ahead given the backdrop of economic uncertainty in the US and around the world.

“It’s hard to ignore all of the narrative around us and some of the commentary around what might be challenging economic times particularly in Europe that seems to be dealing with that more dramatically so far than the US,” Wilson said.

Also during the call, Wilson said some people believed it wouldn’t be possible for EA to maintain the momentum during the height of COVID when people stayed home, played more games, and spent more money on games. But Wilson said this isn’t happened for EA.

“Many had believed that we were going to see meaningful changes, a meaningful drop-off to our engagement post-COVID as the world kind of went mostly back to normal,” he said. “And we haven’t seen that yet. We’ve continued to see really strong engagement across our products. And certainly, with the launch of FIFA and Madden, both of which are up and the ongoing strength in Apex and The Sims, we feel really good about the future.”

For the last quarter, EA saw its revenue and profit increase year-over-year. In the past three months, EA made more than $1 billion from microtransactions alone.

EA has a number of big upcoming games in the works, including Need for Speed Unbound in December, the Dead Space remake in January, and a “major” game that could be Jedi Survivor in 2023.