Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson posted an update yesterday explaining that EA would be reorganizing into two divisions: EA Sports and EA Entertainment. Our collective reaction to reading this news was, well, this GIF probably works:
This could matter a lot down the line for all we know, but there’s nothing here one way or another to really read much into so far. Cam Weber was already seemingly in charge of the EA Sports division before this shakeup, and now he becomes the President of EA Sports after this announcement.
With expanded business ownership, he [Cam Weber] will accelerate the teams’ ambitious growth plans, including building EA SPORTS FC and our American football franchises into connected multi-platform ecosystems.
“Multi-platform ecosystems” is some good-times corporate speak, but I think EA Sports is already doing that whether you want to pull in the mobile titles, microtransactions, esports, branding, “live services” and so on. It’s another way for saying “make money in every way possible” more or less to me. The only thing I would really guess that matters here is that the autonomy for the EA Sports group itself will go up, which probably makes sense because sports games are weird. They’re basically the only video game genre where it’s still accepted that there will be yearly titles that are also there to squeeze you for microtransactions. Sure, a Call of Duty game might come out just about every year, but even that now has a free-to-play element in Warzone. Sports games probably also have the highest licensing fees, and they’re just an anomaly in video games — and really always have been in various ways.
With that in mind, it probably makes sense to silo off EA Sports so it can just be whatever it wants to be, for better or worse. EA is a massive company that cares about things both inside and outside of video games, so allowing EA Sports to lean into the “sports” side of things while having EA Entertainment now be everything else does make some sense.
All that said, in the short term we would guess this does not really mean much of anything for upcoming EA Sports games.
