Surfer has geared a major turnaround with ea announcing record earnings in 2017. Joining me today on bloomberg studio 1. 0, Electronic Arts ceo Andrew Wilson. Lets start at the beginning of your time at ea. 2013, the company was struggling financially. The consumerist name to the Worst Company of the year two years in a row, but today, it is different. You have reported record profits. What did you do differently . Andrew i have been in the company 2000. In 2013, they made me ceo. Emily i dont think that is quite true. Andrew somewhere in there is some truth. We had struggled. It wasnt because we were a bad company or made bad games. We said, what is the most important thing . Who facilitates us to do what we love . That is the player. We started every conversation for the longest time and continuing today is, is this good for the player . Age ago now, an but it is still the forefront of our memory, is there was a bunch of stuff that we were doing they did not like. There was a bunch of stuff they expected us to be doing and we werent. When you run a public company, you have to make sure the games are great, scalable. Emily tell me some of the hard decisions you made . Just after i got the role, we launched battlefield for. It struggled with scalability. Just the infrastructure. We had to make a judgment. When not going to deliver more paid content until we fix this for our gamers. A year later, we were launching another battlefield game and it was not quite ready. Firstperson shooters always launch in the quarter right before the holidays. We had to make a decision for our players. We held it. That was the big move to hold the biggest game in the biggest quarter and ship it six months later. That, theys see recognize we were serious. We have made a series of decisions like that in service of our player. You look after them, they look after you. Emily what are you excited about most this year . Andrew everything we do is fun but reaching people through new platforms, mobile, new games, new Business Models come a new geographies, more people play games now than ever before. When you are not building for a hundred million people, but 2. 5 billion people, then you can do impressive and wonderful things. Emily you mention mobile, how much money are you making for mobile . Andrew mobile is a growing business. We had more downloads than any other publisher last year. Maddens top of the charts. Star wars continues to do well. Emily do you wish you had a candy crush, angry birds . Andrew angry birds is been and gone. I think candy crush is a tremendous game. The mobile business is tough, but we have a madden. It is right up there with candy crush. Ims is a bige s opportunity for us. Emily the Competitive Landscape your competitors keep raising the bar. How would you describe the competition . Timew the competition for , not just people who make videogames, people who make movies, books, tv, music. It is sports we play, family time. We are working on building experiences that enhance all of those things. We are not trying to take away from peoples lives. We are trying to be additive to it. The notion that 24 hours in a day is an impediment is no longer an issue for us. I look at my daughter who is five years old and does seven things at once. Our job is how can we enhance their lives and enhance enjoyment and entertainment value. Emily i think the popular perception of games is that it uck, they are detracting from your life, especially as you get a generation of children getting s from games. Andrew games allow you to build selfesteem by overcoming challenges. We build sandboxes they give people the opportunity to create. When we think about why people immersion, social connection, competition, creation, selfimprovement. These are all core motivators of why people play. Kids who place for games, their sports iq is higher than professionals. Emily how did you get into the Gaming Business . Andrew i had worked in the internet business. Been involved in content creation and creative. Diligent sports person, surfing, rugby, and it was a little studio from a Company CalledElectronic Arts making a surfing game, a rugby had all these engineers, but did not really have anyone who knew about sports. I got the opportunity to work for ea. 18 years later, here i am. Emily women have been for so in gameerrepresented makers and in gaming themselves. Cut of progress are you making . Emily women have been for so long underrepresented in game makers and gaming themselves. Not just underrepresented it, but portrayed negatively. What kind of progress are you seeing . Andrew i think we are making tremendous progress. Whoas probably 90 males play games, 10 females. That is not an inviting environment. Now it is almost 5050. Do on theme work to environment, but when we think about how we portray women in games, we added National Womens ifa game. Our fe our lead character in star wars this year is a woman. These are the women that you may have seen in videogames 10 years ago. It is a strong, powerful, inspiring leaders that our young women playing these games can look up to and be inspired by. There is not gratuitous violence against women. The them isclo appropriate. That is not something we mandated as a company. It is something our company believed in in transit rate. As intrinsically. Means changing the representation of women inside our company. We are making headway there. We have a lot of great senior creative and business leaders, including members of our board. Third, which is perhaps the greatest place we can have the impact, inside our communities. We reach hundreds and hundreds of millions of people around the globe and we are trying to foster an inviting and Inclusive Community among gameplayers. We believe by the leadership position we have, we can do that. We are actively taking action around that. Emily Online Harassment is a especiallygeneral, women on social networks and games themselves. Had we make the environment better for women inside these multiplayer communities . Andrew we believe in a diverse, inclusive environment for men and women. Games should bring us joy and happiness and extend the wonderful things in our lives, and we are taking action. Our Global Community group spends every minute of every day looking at every conversation and looking for opportunities, not just to police the ad in this, but encouraged the goodness. As the father of a fiveyearold girl, that is important to me. As a father of a twoyearold son, i want him to grow up and understand this is an everybody issue. In supportto grow up of things in service of his sister where she can be anything she wants. Emily the gamer Gate Campaign led to widespread harassment of women in the gaming industry on social networks. Why do you think that happened . Andrew it was a multifaceted problem and very disappointing for me. Hard to try and quell that and move people on and help people understand. I think that when you get anonymity in the internet, people have the willingness to behave in a way that is unacceptable. People to understand that is not acceptable and foster an inclusive, diverse, welcoming culture for men and women. Emily would changing anonymity and or requiring People Choose their real names, is that an option . Andrew i think that is an internet problem. We will do all we can to solve the problems we can and be a voice for change and a catalyst for the positive movement that is a diverse it, inclusive culture. Emily main street was criticized for not speaking up, was that fair . Everybody involved in that was criticized by verys parties. We came out and clearly stood by , for us, diversity, inclusion, both in our games, in our employee base, in our community. We were very solid on that. I dont spend a of time talking politics, but do spend as much time as i can upholding the values of our company. Emily an interesting study of behavior found that just kicking out the bad players didnt change so much, that the negative behavior continued. What did make the change was changing the rules and trying to enforce the norms of positive behavior. Are you seeing that . Andrew the appropriate representation of women in our games is a big change and a big shift, because not only does fact as an inspiration for young women who are playing our games, who see these characters in our games who are strong, powerful, and independent, it also helps the boys laying the games that that is exactly as it should be as well. They shouldnt be fearful of this, back away from this, a world where we have equal voice in equal position in the community is a world we want to live in. We spent a lot of time trying to amplify that message among young boys and girls. We are seeing positive change. Andrew there is concern that these issues could get worse as we move into Virtual Reality. Is this a cause for concern . Andrew i dont know whether it is cause for concern. I think we have to be deliberate about how we make these moves and the behavior we condone in these environments, the game design and how it facilitates interaction inside Virtual Worlds because we do know that there are people in this world who dont behave the right way. We cant be the global sensors of all behavior, but we have to be deliberate about the behavior we encourage in our Virtual Worlds, and we are spending time thinking through at a design level, platform level. Emily is Virtual Reality living up to the hype . Weird andpe is a wonderful thing. We all won virtualreality to be the thing we dreamed of as young people. We want to immerse ourselves in experiences we would otherwise never have the chance to experience. Spatialto overcome a disconnect between us and our tv screen. Us to meeto allow people and do things we could not otherwise do. Innovative that has technology, Consumer Value proposition, low barriers has a big opportunity. Emily tell me about your be our efforts and a our efforts vr efforts and ar efforts. Engine we have a single for all our games. A game last year and are working on a mobile game. How to to understand develop at a core engine level. Lets implement that. The other big challenge is designed. The three biggest categories are actionadventure, firstperson shooter, and sports. All of which is challenging inside of vr right now. Go,y we have seen pokemon locationbased services, what do your efforts look like . Andrew pokemon go gave us a sense of what might be possible. And thelook at ar verys things apple and google are providing for us in mobile, think about any information that may overlay and experience to enhance that experience. That might be geolocation, other things you do in your life, what your friends are doing, what is in your calendar, what is in your fridge. At how manyng strings of information does any player have available to them and how life they use those streams of data to extend and enhance their experience so that when i am playing the sims, the amount of eggs in my fridge might have an impact. Mobile, playing madden when im at a game i have access to different players then when im not at again. If i am at soccer practice, i am rewarded when im back to playing my fifa game. So its not just in terms of geoservices, but how many streams of data are available and how might we use those to enhance the play experience. Emily we have not seen cloudbased gaming takeoff. There is no netflix of gaming come yet. Does that change . Emily we havent seen cloudbased gaming take off. There is no netflix of gaming, yet. Does that change . Greatest disruptor to the consumption of Media Entertainment has been streaming plus subscription. It as change the way we watch television, ms. To music, read books. The notion a impact our industry is naive. Will it take longer . Yes. For a bunch of reasons, file size, design. When you listen to a led zeppelin album on your phone, car, or pc, it doesnt change. When we design a game that lives in a streaming world, we have to think about screen size. In the clouddden manifest on your mobile phone . How does that manifest on your does ittv, and how manifest on the dashboard of your car as you drive to work . It is a design challenge. We have Technology Challenges with bandwidth and file sizes. We have Technology Challenges when it comes to screen size. Partll play an important in a world in the future of the same way it does with movies, tvs, books. Emily your competitors are selling franchises to their games for millions of dollars. What is eas strategy . Andrew we launched our second year for madden competitive gaming. We have all teams and all players involved. We are excited about that. We are going into the second year of our fifa competitive gaming and we have battlefield competitive gaming coming. We saw exponential growth and engagement. People who engaged engaged at three times the rate of people who didnt, so we have maintained for some time that competitive gaming is a way to engage a player base. The two greatest positive motivators of human behavior, social connection in competition. Emily how big do think desports will be . Andrew human beings love to watch anything where the best in the world are doing it and the stakes are high. Take something that literally 2. 5 billion people do on the planet and you have an audience ready to engage. What we are seeing now is the great players amongst those 2. 5 billion players are rising to the top and the stakes are high. When you watch our games being played, it is true entertainment. They are the best in the world doing it and the stakes are high. One, the force awakens, overall Merchandise Sales are slower than when disney first came out with the reboot. In the second do as well as the first . Andrew what they said about our first battlefront game was this is an amazing game, but it needs to be bigger, broader, deeper, Single Player campaign, space battles, more complexity in player evolution inside the game, so we have built a game that is three times the size of the first one. ,t is three times broader deeper, is, Single Player campaign. We are doing everything we can in our power to deliver to our large Star Wars Community the game they want. Emily had you think about the potential to deepen your relationship with disney . Andrew we have a great relationship with disney. They have some wonderful ip. They have in wonderful partners. We complement what they do. If there is an opportunity, we would jump at the chance. Emily would there come a day when you dont release new titles on your franchises every year and just release online content like take two with grand theft auto . Answer is yes. Rt a few things have to happen first. We do a lot in fifa and with madden. There is a lot of code we make available as part of the new iteration. In korea or china, we dont do it that way. Every four years, we read these and new big code drop and offer incremental change over time. What we see in korea and china and mobile is a world that might happen in other parts of our business. Emily apple has been pushing to become a bigger platforming games. It hasnt happened. Do you think that will happen for apple . Andrew the app store is a big business, and games have been the lines share of that business. Subscription Services Like spot ef netflix, youtube, tidl rise to the top of the app charts because apple and others understand subscription is a really valuable way to engage with the consumer base. Valuable for the person subscription, and value for subscriber. It is a friction free way of ingesting large amounts of content. I think they are doing a great job and you will continue to see games as part of their app store come up but you might see their Business Model around games change, and we are getting ready for that. Emily how will the Business Model change . Andrew free to play is a wonderful Business Model that has allowed mobile to become as big as the console platforms in terms of overall game revenue, but we are seeing a propensity for App Store Users to engage in netflix and spot a fight and and pandorapotify and random dating apps through subscription. Weare saying is there a way can offer great values to players through subscription and mobile . I dont think we are there yet, but something we are looking at. Emily where is ea in five years . Andrew hopefully they still have an australian has ceo. I think what you will see from as result of our Pioneering Spirit and consumer focused, that we are one of the Great Entertainment companies and have delivered wonderful gaming experiences to an evergrowing, ever engaging population of players of all genders and backgrounds, and people look at us and think that is a Great Company and i am happy to have them as part of our lives. Emily all right, Andrew Wilson ceo of Electronic Arts, hopefully ceo in five years. Andrew we will see. Emily thank you for being on bloomberg studio 1. 0. Andrew thank you very much. Announcer from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Charlie we begin tonight with the president of argentina. He visited new york yesterday in honor of the five argentinian tourists who died in the terrorism attack in lower manhattan. I spoke with him at the america society. We talked about argentina, the relationship with the u. S. , and challenges facing the region