35% or more of EA Sports players spend on Ultimate Team CFO Blake Jorgensen says publisher focuses on getting people into the funnel, not on making payers spend more

Brendan Sinclair North American Editor Tuesday 5th December 2017 Share this article Share

Companies in this article Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts' Ultimate Team game modes have an impressive conversion rate. Speaking at the NASDAQ 37th Investor Program today, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen broke down the numbers on its EA Sports games.

"Today about 70-75% of all the people that buy the sports games join Ultimate Team," Jorgensen said. "It's fun. It's a great way to play the game. Of those 75% of the people, about half of those people actually spend some money and the other half just play without spending. But in a free-to-play world, that's a fantastic balance of spenders and non-spenders."

He also addressed the company's strategy for growing those numbers, saying, "We spend very little time trying to get people to spend more money. We really try to spend most of our time getting people into the funnel because we know once they're into the game, they'll really have a good time, and they'll play it for a long period of time."

Jorgensen returned to that idea later in the presentation, saying that people are playing fewer games these days, but playing them for longer periods of time thanks to live services and regular events.

"This entertainment form is probably one of the greatest entertainment values for consumers," Jorgensen said. "If you go to a movie today, it can cost you in the US $20 to get in the movie before you buy popcorn, which is fun. It's great, I love it. But at the same time, a $60 video game that people are playing three, four, five thousand hours during the year on, that's a lot of value for your money. And even if you spend some money on top of that, you're typically spending it on increasing the fun and excitement of the game. So we're just trying to give the consumers what they really want, and more of it, versus trying to build another game or do something different."