Earnings Call Transcript - EA Q2 2025

Operator, Operator

Good afternoon. My name is John, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Electronic Arts Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Andrew Uerkwitz, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Andrew Uerkwitz, Vice President, Investor Relations

Thank you. Welcome to EA’s Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2025 Earnings Call. With me today are Andrew Wilson, our CEO; and Stuart Canfield, our CFO. Please note that our SEC filings and our earnings release are available at ir.ea.com. In addition, we have posted detailed earnings slides to accompany our prepared remarks. Lastly, after the call, we will post our prepared remarks, an audio replay of this call, and a transcript. With regards to our calendar; our third quarter fiscal year 2025 earnings call is scheduled for February 4th, 2025. As a reminder, we post the schedule of upcoming earnings calls for the fiscal year on our IR website. This presentation and our comments include forward-looking statements regarding future events and the future financial performance of the Company. Actual events and results may differ materially from our expectations. We refer you to our most recent Form 10-Q for a discussion of risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed today. Electronic Arts makes these statements as of today, October 29th, 2024, and disclaims any duty to update them. During this call, the financial metrics, with the exception of free cash flow and non-GAAP operating margin, will be presented on a GAAP basis. All comparisons made in the course of this call are against the same period in the prior year unless otherwise stated. Now, I’ll turn the call over to Andrew Wilson.

Andrew Wilson, CEO

Thanks, Andrew. Good afternoon. EA’s strong fiscal year continues as we once again exceeded expectations this quarter and raised our full-year guidance. Our achievements during this period, fueled by the depth and quality of our portfolio and the outstanding contributions of our teams, showcase the growing momentum within our business and our progress toward our strategic vision. During our recent investor day, we communicated our vision for EA’s role in shaping the future of entertainment. We clarified how we are executing across our three strategic pillars: creating engaging content and experiences for vast online communities, storytelling through blockbuster narratives, and leveraging community power in and around our games. In the near term, we discussed how our creative teams are using our production capabilities and diverse IP to foster and engage some of the largest online communities across various modes of play, creation, watching, and connecting. We illustrated our approach to storytelling through expansive worlds, well-developed characters, and innovative gameplay. We have a tremendous opportunity to broaden new ways to play, introduce new tools for creation and sharing, and find new ways to connect with more players over a longer period in more regions to foster meaningful growth in our business. For the medium-term, we discussed initial steps we are taking to go beyond our games to engage our current fans more deeply and attract new audiences. Given the size of our community, their engagement level, and our brand’s strength, we are starting with EA SPORTS. We provided early insights into how we are utilizing our data, technology, and expertise to create new tools for simulations and community-driven content as well as new experiences that unite real and virtual sports fandom within the EA SPORTS App. As the industry undergoes a significant transformation in how fans consume content and interact with their favorite leagues, teams, and players through more social, interactive, and immersive experiences, we believe we are well-positioned to capture a larger share of sports fandom. Lastly, in the long term, we see potential in generative AI to significantly expand, transform, and innovate new entertainment experiences. This could lead to entirely new business opportunities centered on social connection and self-expression. We aim to empower creators to craft new ways to play, create, watch, and connect that we have yet to imagine. Looking back at this quarter, it was primarily driven by the strength of our portfolio and the exceeding performance of our sports franchises. The strength of EA SPORTS stems from our teams’ exceptional ability to develop rich, valuable IP that celebrates the world’s premier sports. Our experiences provide extraordinary excitement, depth, authenticity, innovation, and quality that players and fans cannot find elsewhere. In American Football, we embarked on a multi-year effort to build upon a vast online community and harness the collective power of American Football fandom to change how they engage with North America’s leading sport. Madden NFL connects real-world events with our community-driven moments, extending in-game experiences and driving engagement all year round. Coupled with the launch of College Football this quarter, we’ve achieved remarkable success in broadening our audience. The number of new players in our community has more than doubled year-over-year, making up about a quarter of the player base. Through September, College Football 25 was not only the top-selling HD title in North America, but it also became a distinctive moment in sports culture, connection, and fandom. Each week, we witness our experience at the heart of fandom surrounding the sport, from stadiums to social media, broadcast booths, tailgates, and dorm rooms. This success exemplifies our strategy at work. Merging College with our long-standing success in Madden NFL, we've created the most immersive and comprehensive American Football experience, becoming integral to the sport's very essence. With new offerings like the MVP bundle and interconnected modes between titles, we have observed substantial engagement within our American Football community. We have more players than ever engaged in the sport; for instance, total hours played in Q2 increased over 140% year-over-year, showcasing that fans are actively playing both games. And we are just getting started. As highlighted at Investor Day, you can expect us to keep adding new connections, more modalities, creative tools, and community spaces beyond gameplay to sustain this momentum into the future. Now, turning to EA SPORTS FC. As EA SPORTS FC enters its second year, the platform is thriving as both interactive entertainment and a global influencer in the world of football. On a trailing 12-month basis, EA SPORTS FC is the leading franchise in the Western world. With FC Mobile and FC Online, we have a truly global platform, reaching over 130% more players worldwide. These hundreds of millions of players have joined the community, discovering joy, competition, inspiration, and cultural celebration along the way. We are connecting with fans on various platforms, across different regions and business models. Consequently, we continue to drive high engagement across our titles and saw year-over-year growth in live services net bookings this quarter. We believe FC 25 is a significant advancement as we pave the way for the future of interactive football fandom. In addition to enhancing EA SPORTS experience hallmarks – exceptional gameplay, immersion, and authenticity – FC 25 is making notable strides in social play with RUSH and new creator tools like Highlighter. The highly social, 5v5 RUSH mode has been embraced by both new and veteran players, becoming the preferred gameplay method for over half of our long-term players. We believe this also drives engagement in Ultimate Team, particularly among those playing with friends. Matches involving friends have more than doubled year-over-year. We've observed that when friends play together, engagement remains deeper and longer, positively influencing monetization. Although it’s early with FC 25, these trends are on an upward trajectory. This quarter, across both American Football and Global Football, we are making significant strides in our strategy to build connected ecosystems, creative tools, and new gameplay modalities in order to develop large online communities. Our teams’ vast capabilities in terms of scale and technology enable us to create the most authentic experiences across the wider sports landscape. This month, we launched NHL 25 featuring enhanced gameplay powered by a new technology called ICE-Q, providing the most authentic hockey experience to date. Our extensive portfolio of EA SPORTS offerings engages and connects hundreds of millions of fans, melding sports, entertainment, technology, fandom, and culture. Across more platforms, modalities, and regions, we deliver interactive experiences that reach more fans than any other sports organization. And we are not stopping there. We are building on this momentum and focusing on harnessing the power of our massive global community with the EA SPORTS App. This will involve engaging our core fans more profoundly while welcoming and inspiring an entirely new generation of sports enthusiasts. Our upcoming soft launch in Spain will emphasize European Football and leverage our partnership with La Liga. Our unique position in connecting real-world sports with interactive entertainment allows us to create a feature-rich app that incorporates sports content such as highlights, interactive live data, and social functionalities. We will start from a strong foundation with our EA SPORTS audience of hundreds of millions. Global Football is just the beginning; we plan to roll out more sports in additional regions over time, with each launch providing data to inform future engaging features. This marks a significant step forward in our ambition to make EA SPORTS the most valuable sports business on the globe. In this quarter, Season 22 of Apex Legends was launched with notably more features for both casual and seasoned players, including additional modes, a new map, and upgraded anti-cheat software. Following modifications to the Battle Pass structure, we did not achieve the uplift in monetization that we anticipated. Two important points have emerged in the free-to-play FPS category. First, in a competitive environment where brand reputation, a solid core player base, and superior mechanics are crucial, Apex has established itself as a strong franchise and a pillar of the industry. Second, to achieve substantial growth and re-engagement, significant systemic changes are necessary. We will maintain our focus on player retention and expanding content for our global community while working towards more radical, innovative changes in the future. Turning to The Sims Universe, it has been nearly 25 years since this beloved franchise was first introduced. To date, over 500 million have joined the community. As discussed at Investor Day, The Sims will evolve beyond linear, sequential releases, aiming to provide players with more ways to engage with the brand than ever before. We are focusing on rebuilding, re-engineering, and reimagining The Sims 4. By establishing The Sims 4 as the franchise's foundation, we enable our players to keep engaging with the content they've amassed, created, and built over the past decade, while also participating in new evolving experiences. This approach allows us to concentrate on developing a variety of games and experiences, including deep simulation games, cozy games, social and collaborative gameplay, and mobile narrative games. The Life and Death Expansion Pack for Sims 4 is set to release on October 31, and early indicators suggest it is trending ahead of Episode 16. Starting in November, we will roll out a new UGX product, The Sims 4 Creator Kits, developed by our community creators. Additionally, MySims: Cozy Bundle will launch on Nintendo Switch in November. In The Sims Labs, an incubator for testing new innovations and features, players are experimenting with a wide array of new concepts. These launches and tests this quarter are crucial to our investment in a vast Sims platform, offering more game experiences, creative options, and ways for players and creators to connect. There’s much more ahead for the franchise, including a film in collaboration with Amazon MGM Studios. The Sims presents a remarkable opportunity as it evolves into a more significant cultural icon and online community. It’s an exciting time at EA, and in just two days, we are set to launch Dragon Age: The Veilguard. It has been ten years since the debut of its predecessor, the game of the year winner, Dragon Age: Inquisition. Early critical reviews are favorable, reflecting the high quality, depth, and detail of this year’s action-packed adventure. We anticipate that Dragon Age will exemplify how our blockbuster storytelling engages and connects fans in uniquely profound ways. Looking forward, I’m thrilled about what we are building toward in the next 6, 12, and 18 months. You can expect more significant developments and news regarding our extensive online communities, including Battlefield and skate, in the upcoming quarters. Our Q2 results signify momentum in our business as we persist in executing our strategy for sustainable long-term growth built upon the engagement modalities of play, create, watch, and connect. Now, I’ll hand the call over to Stuart for a closer look at this quarter and our overall business.

Stuart Canfield, CFO

Thank you, Andrew, and hello everyone. Building on our momentum from Q1, we achieved record net bookings for Q2, surpassing the top end of our guidance. This result reflects our team's dedication to providing high-quality experiences that engage and entertain our global communities, particularly demonstrated by the strong performance of our EA SPORTS franchises. As we conclude a remarkable first half of the fiscal year, we are increasing our FY25 guidance. Looking ahead, we remain committed to executing the strategic roadmap discussed at our Investor Day, with a focus on long-term value creation through enhanced scale to drive revenue growth, better margins, and increased cash flow. For Q2, net bookings reached $2.08 billion, marking a 14% increase year-over-year, driven by the positive reception of EA SPORTS College Football 25. We experienced minimal impact from foreign exchange fluctuations this quarter. Our full game net bookings amounted to $832 million, a 20% year-over-year increase, primarily due to the successful expansion of our American Football ecosystem. Our live services generated $1.25 billion in net bookings, a 10% year-over-year rise, exceeding our expectations as our American Football Ultimate Team modes provided engaging entertainment for players across both College Football and Madden NFL. Live services accounted for 74% of our business on a trailing twelve-month basis. As mentioned during our Investor Day, a key part of our long-term strategy is expanding our Massive Online Communities. In Q2, we made significant progress in growing American Football with the successful launch of College Football 25, complementing our Madden NFL HD and mobile offerings. The strong performance of our MVP Bundle highlights the strength of a unified community and an expanded ecosystem of experiences. As we grow this live services business, we've seen substantial net bookings growth from increased engagement and the onboarding of new players, with both engagement and spending more than doubling year-over-year. It's clear players are enjoying both experiences, and as we move forward, we will build an even more interconnected ecosystem. Momentum also continues in Global Football, with net bookings in FY25 on track to surpass the record set in the previous year. For the quarter, we aligned with our expectations as the strength of EA SPORTS FC 24 continued leading up to the successful launch of FC 25. In our new HD title, we're making strides in delivering engaging experiences, including RUSH and content in our Ultimate Team business, resulting in improved spender conversion and monetization metrics year-over-year. Additionally, both FC Mobile and FC Online experienced net bookings growth due to improved monetization. At our Investor Day, we noted that Apex Legends net bookings did not meet our expectations for the quarter, as we extended freemium access for the entire first half of the Season 22 Battle Pass. After the second half release of the Battle Pass on September 17th, we noticed a return to spending conversion levels consistent with earlier seasons. Looking ahead, we have adjusted our FY25 outlook to account for lower engagement than previously anticipated. As Andrew highlighted, we are dedicated to delivering new experiences for our players while enhancing engagement and retention. In The Sims, we are advancing the franchise by providing new player experiences that engage and captivate our community. This quarter, we launched the Reaper’s Reward gameplay event, which offered weekly challenges and resulted in a 6% year-over-year increase in weekly active users. The event, along with increased engagement throughout the quarter, generated strong player demand for our content catalog, exceeding our expectations. Moving forward, we plan to continue growing our community through targeted updates, new experiences, and user-generated content, starting with Creator Kits and MySims: Cozy Bundle in November. Now, regarding our GAAP quarterly results, we achieved Q2 net revenue of $2.03 billion, up 6% year-over-year. Gross margins increased by 130 basis points primarily due to a higher digital mix and lower licensing costs. Operating expenses were lower than anticipated at $1.19 billion, a 10% year-over-year increase, primarily due to expenses from our February restructuring event and higher personnel costs supporting our strategic initiatives. Earnings per share were $1.11. For reference, in the previous year's period, we had a $0.34 one-time non-cash tax benefit. We recorded a record Q2 operating cash flow of $234 million, more than double that of the previous year, mainly due to launch timing. Our trailing twelve-month free cash flow reached $1.98 billion, emphasizing the strength of our business. In the second quarter, we returned $426 million to stockholders through stock buybacks and dividends. Moving on to guidance, our solid performance in the first half allows us to raise our net bookings guidance for FY25 to a range of $7.5 billion to $7.8 billion, which is a year-over-year increase of 1% to 5%. This revised range includes a midpoint at the top end of our previous guidance. Our second half net bookings expectations are as follows: we still expect our American Football business to exceed $1 billion for FY25; after the successful launch of FC 25, we anticipate growth for our EA SPORTS FC franchise over its record FY24; despite lower expectations for Apex Legends, we expect to maintain mid-single-digit growth in our core live services; and we are keeping our assumptions for our upcoming Dragon Age: The Veilguard launch this week and our partner title set to launch in Q4. Regarding our FY25 GAAP outlook, we are increasing net revenue guidance to $7.4 billion to $7.7 billion. We expect the cost of revenue to be approximately $1.53 billion to $1.56 billion. Our expected operating expenses are adjusted to around $4.445 billion to $4.515 billion, reflecting a 3% to 4% year-over-year rise. Consequently, we anticipate GAAP operating margins between 19.3% and 21.1%. Our non-GAAP operating margin is projected at 30.7% to 32.1%, with the impact of the change in deferred net revenue anticipated to be around 90 to 80 basis points. This leads to a revised earnings per share projection of $3.82 to $4.33. We are also raising our operating cash flow guidance to $2.075 billion to $2.275 billion, while capital expenditures are now expected to be $225 million. Thus, our free cash flow guidance of $1.85 billion to $2.05 billion remains unchanged. If foreign exchange rates stay constant, we foresee minimal impact to net bookings from FX. For further details on the impact of FX changes, please refer to our earnings slides. Looking to Q3, we expect net bookings between $2.4 billion and $2.55 billion, which represents a year-over-year increase of 1% to 8%, driven mainly by the launch of Dragon Age and ongoing growth in our EA SPORTS FC franchise. We anticipate that our catalog's performance and the effects from sunset mobile titles will present a combined headwind of around 3%. We project net revenue in the range of $1.875 billion to $2.025 billion, with cost of revenue estimated at $450 million to $480 million, and operating expenses of about $1.1 billion to $1.15 billion, which should result in earnings per share between $0.85 and $1.02. Before I hand the call back to Andrew, I want to restate our confidence in our long-term financial framework, which we initially introduced earlier this year and elaborated on during our Investor Day. As we exit the first half of fiscal year 2025, we have strong momentum, which allows us to raise our full-year guidance while firmly believing in our potential to significantly outperform the market in net bookings growth through FY27. As we grow our top-line, we expect substantial margin expansion from FY25 to FY27, even as we continue investing in the future. Our strong framework for long-term value creation is intact, and we are committed to executing the strategic priorities and initiatives we presented during our Investor Day. Finally, I would like to thank those of you who attended our Investor Day last month, both in person and via livestream. We appreciate your support in our journey as we shape the future of entertainment.

Andrew Wilson, CEO

In Q2, we achieved several high-quality launches and significant enhancements to our live services that generated strong momentum across our business. This signals exciting prospects ahead as we implement our long-term strategy. As more players engage with games and experiences to play, create, watch, and connect, we have a tremendous opportunity to develop and expand fully connected platforms that provide greater value and reduced friction for fans everywhere. We are shaping this future today. Our exceptional teams, leveraging advanced technology, are continually exploring the depth and scope of what entertainment can achieve. Therefore, we are well-positioned to take advantage of our greatest opportunities and grow as a global leader in entertainment. Now, Stuart and I are ready to address your questions.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. We will now begin our question-and-answer session. Your first question comes from the line of Colin Sebastian with Baird.

Colin Sebastian, Analyst

Great. Thanks and good afternoon. The growth in American football, obviously very impressive, well done with college football. I guess as one sort of follow-up, Andrew to your plans for that. How do you capture that momentum on a long-term basis? Obviously, there's a lot of content involved in community but any more details on the product roadmap there that give us a little more visibility into potentially growing that on a year-over-year sustained level? And as a follow-up on the launch plans for the EA SPORTS app, I guess the broader opportunities in connecting video games with sports data, sports information and live sports, how should we think about the cadence of the rollout of those services? And how much maybe partnerships will play a role with that? Thank you very much.

Andrew Wilson, CEO

Thank you for your questions. First, regarding American football, our EA SPORTS team has a well-thought-out rollout plan. As mentioned earlier, we've shifted from an annual product launch model to creating a year-round platform for all American football fans. This change focuses on enhancing community-driven events and engagement with the sport throughout the entire year. A few years ago, we identified the need to reintroduce College Football not as a replacement for Madden but to further engage with the broader football fan community and to build synergy between both franchises. This strategy has been evident, particularly with the successful MVP bundle this season. As we consider future developments, including Team Builder and Ultimate Team, our teams are focused on fostering a robust football fan community for both NFL and College football. We have dedicated teams working on innovative ideas to expand both areas, aiming to become the leading platform for football fans in the country, collaborating closely with partners from the NFL, colleges, and conferences. This year, we've seen significant business growth, more than doubling our player base, with 25% of those being returning fans. Engagement across our products has increased significantly, up by 140%. It’s clear that our business is thriving, supporting the fan community effectively, and we're optimistic about future growth both in gameplay and social engagement. Regarding the EA SPORTS app, we see a great opportunity to unite the vast number of sports fans who engage with our games daily. Fans often go to different platforms to discuss their games or share content, and we aim to streamline that experience, enhancing the overall fan engagement beyond our games. Our extensive partnerships in the sports world enable us to introduce real-world sports content, highlights, and commentary, creating an integrated experience for our fan base, potentially attracting more fans, even those who don’t currently play our games. We are launching this initiative starting in Spain with our strong partnership with La Liga, allowing us to combine real-world and virtual content effectively. With more sports partnerships than any other entity globally, we plan to enhance the sports fan experience across various sports. Our rollout will be phased, allowing us to learn from our fans and adapt based on what features resonate most with them. This comprehensive approach to merging real and virtual fan experiences is innovative and will require careful planning as we progress.

Colin Sebastian, Analyst

Great. Thanks Andrew.

Eric Handler, Analyst

Good afternoon. Thanks for the question. I wonder if you'd be willing to sort of break down your live services in terms of as you're thinking about guidance for this year between will live services for sports, should we think about that up being double digits? And what does that mean for your non-sports business?

Stuart Canfield, CFO

Eric, Stuart. Let me just frame a couple of things in. I think the most important on live services as part of raising our guidance obviously, we passed through H1 before outperformance, which obviously incorporate elements of live service, as we started and launched our over EA SPORTS franchise. We have said that we will continue to see live service growth be mid-single digits through the back half of the year. And you should think that's driven by a couple of key elements. One, we've stated we have two live services across both College and NFL, and we do expect our business to continue to reach over $1 billion in net bookings. We obviously expect growth in our FC franchise over a record prior year in FY '24, which incorporates our life service business as well. And we have obviously launched a full game that are different to the prior year in Q4. And despite the pragmatism we put inside of Apex, we do expect that the holistic overall business will remain at mid-single digits with obviously a heavier mix on sports, and less so on non-sports or entertainment, but net back into a growth position for the year.

Eric Handler, Analyst

Okay. And then just as a follow-up. So as you take the learnings for season 22, I believe for Apex. How are you thinking about the next season and what you progress with in terms of the battle passes and any other types of experiences in the season?

Stuart Canfield, CFO

Yes. First of all, let's talk a little about Q2. I think we tried to outline that post giving guidance previously as we talked about Investor Day. We have changed fundamentally as part of the ongoing innovation are part of the service and how we reinvigorate and bring deeper feature set into the product as we move forward. So we did make meaningful changes. We split the Battle Pass into two. We actually extended the freemium entry point inside of that first period, that first split as we call out. We launched the premium aspect actually on our Investor Day, and we saw meaningful conversion get back to prior levels on the way through. We have seen a lower player engagement base of this part of the cycle and we have reflected that all the way through the rest of the year. So Andrew's earlier comments, we have an incredible IP and game inside of Apex. We continue to invest behind making sure we have meaningful change and systemic change inside the product, as we look to the future and you expect us to see that we can start to grow the business back as we get through the latter parts of early 2016 and beyond.

Andrew Wilson, CEO

I might add a little something there as we think about Apex. I think again, along with my prepared remarks, but just a little more context, I think what we've come to understand is we look at these large-scale live service-driven free-to-play businesses, particularly with our experience in Asia and in the West. And what we have observed over the last 15 years or 20 years, is really two things. One is that once you reach a level of scale by virtue of a quality game with incredible mechanics, innovation, creativity, and a large global player base. It is very, very difficult to displace them from the top tier of games played in the world. But what is equally true is that the level of innovation and creativity has to continue to scale with the community over time to ensure you can maintain growth and not just maintain size. And so as you think about us in Apex, we are in an incredibly good position given that we have reached that very top tier. We do have an incredibly strong brand, a really strong mechanic, and a very committed global community. As we go forward, we'll really be investing on two vectors. The first is in the growth of our season-oriented content, and what you've seen from us over the last few seasons is progressively bigger season drops each time. Very high quality has driven very high sentiment amongst our player base, and we are adding to the level of innovation and creativity on a season-by-season basis. But to Stuart's point, as we think about step function growth over the course of time, what we've also observed is a need for kind of meaningful systematic innovation in the game that fundamentally changes the way the game plays more broadly and our teams are working on that as well. And so we do have a moment right now where we are managing the current trajectory of the business, but we believe by virtue of the strength of the brand, the size of the global community, the position we hold in the top tier of these free-to-play live service games that will be able to return that to growth in the business side over the course of time.

Eric Handler, Analyst

Appreciate that answer. Thanks.

Andrew Marok, Analyst

Thanks for taking my question. Maybe building off the back of that last explanation there. As you're going through the systematic rethink of Apex, how much of this can maybe be done fixing a part while the car is in motion? Or is this something that may require like a whole studs up rebuild and something like an Apex 2.0 might be the way to go about it rather than incremental change?

Andrew Wilson, CEO

It's a great question and likely beyond what we can cover today. Generally speaking, in the context of live service-driven games at scale, second versions have rarely achieved the same level of success as the first versions. Our main goal right now is to continue supporting our global player base while delivering new and innovative content on a seasonal basis. We also aim to develop additional features without requiring players to sacrifice their progress or investments in the current ecosystem. It’s never ideal to force our community to choose between their past investments and future innovations. Therefore, we will focus on enhancing the core experience, which you can see evolving season after season as our seasons grow larger and we modify key aspects of gameplay. We plan to create more engagement opportunities through different gameplay modalities, without having to split the experience. The team is currently working through these strategies.

Andrew Marok, Analyst

Great. Thank you on that. And then maybe one quick one on Veilguard, if I could. I have seen some very strong reviews so far. But as far as you can tell, what drives that kind of breakout of success we've seen in some single-player fantasy games in the last couple of years? And how do you feel that Veilguard might compare along those lines? Thank you.

Andrew Wilson, CEO

I certainly think Veilguard has breakout potential. Again, 10 years ago, Dragon Age: Inquisition one Game of the Year and was a very strong performer for us in the conduct of our business. This is entertainment. And so while much of our business has moved to live service moment-to-moment, deliver innovation and creativity for a deeply engaged community over the course of time. This opportunity to bring in incredibly high-quality, creative storytelling set in an amazing world with rich characters living out those stories, you are able to capture that moment in entertainment success almost certainly follows. And we see that in the context of movies, and we're seeing in the context of TV seasons, and we see in the context of video games. When we think about what we have with Veilguard right now, we have a storied studio in BioWare. We have a storied IP and Dragon Age. We have a team that took extra time to make sure the world was rich and the characters were interesting and the story was compelling. I think we're going into a market that has limited competition for this category of game given some of the moves that have happened across the broader industry. And so while I think it's too early to predict the outcome, the critical reviews have been incredibly strong. The team feels really energized by what they have delivered. And my sense is that yes, it has breakout capabilities.

Andrew Marok, Analyst

Great. Thank you.

Stuart Canfield, CFO

Andrew, just to add for that. Just on the back of Andrew's comments, obviously, we feel with positioning probably well for the purpose of how we think about the back half of the year, we maintained our original assumptions for the game at this point.

Chris Schoell, Analyst

Great. Thank you very much. Stuart, using the midpoint of your guidance range, I believe, implies a bookings acceleration in fiscal 4Q relative to fiscal 3Q. Can you just help us think through the drivers there? I recognize there is a partner title, but any incremental color would be helpful. And then maybe just one on the football franchise. I appreciate the stats you gave on a total football basis. But any further details you can give regarding College football's impact on Madden to date? And how do you expect that dynamic to evolve going forward? Thank you.

Stuart Canfield, CFO

So first of all, so as we outlined before in the macro framework, we obviously passed through H1 performance through the full year, which means by implication, we're expecting the balance here to deliver on our expectations with some puts and takes on key properties. As you think about the quarterly phasing is always important to remember, we have differences between release slates, obviously seasonality and title launches would change some of that mix and some of those comparable year-on-year look back in past quarters where it's World Cup. 18 months ago, we have a new title launch in Q4 this year, we didn't have before. So have to take you through some of the puts and takes around the phasing between Q3 and Q4 as we see that occur. On the overall American football business, we feel incredibly convicted that performance that we saw inside of Q2. Obviously, to a somewhat Andrew's commentary earlier, we had strong performance from both NPV College and obviously, the overall broader existence of American football. And we expect both of those properties to still continue as part existed through the back half of the year by virtue of the raised midpoint that we put inside the guidance.

Chris Schoell, Analyst

Great. Thank you very much.

Doug Creutz, Analyst

Hi, thank you. You mentioned Dragon Age: Inquisition earlier, and it is fair to say that BioWare has faced a challenging decade with significant management turnover and some titles that did not perform as expected. What has Lora accomplished in recent years to position BioWare to deliver a strong title like Veilguard? And what does this indicate about BioWare's future moving forward?

Andrew Wilson, CEO

It's a really good question. And there's a great deal of things that have happened. First, I would say, as we look back over BioWare, BioWare has been across a number of different studios and built a number of different types of games. Anthem is probably the one that people remember most for not really living up to the expectations of what a BioWare game should be. And while that is almost certainly true, what I'd remind people is that it was also BioWare trying to do something very, very different than what would typically be known as a BioWare game. It was really about building different mechanics and different models at play into a BioWare world. And while the reviews at the time actually heralded the world as being incredibly rich and wonderful and high fidelity and traversing that world being great and some characters being super interesting, the pieces of the puzzle just didn't quite come together in the way that I think BioWare had hoped. A big shift happened after that, which was BioWare really returning to BioWare type games, really returning to BioWare's strength. And what's happened subsequently since Anthem is the BioWare team has really rallied around what made BioWare a fan favorite studio and a fan favorite brand and the types of games they make: incredibly rich worlds, incredibly nuanced characters, really powerful and compelling stories with camaraderie and friendship and relationships and decisions that matter in the context of gameplay. And I think it's really been that return to what made BioWare great and giving the studio the time to really deliver against what makes BioWare great in the context of the Dragon Age world that amounts to a game like Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

Doug Creutz, Analyst

Great. Thank you.

Andrew Wilson, CEO

Okay. Well, thank you all for being here, and thank you for your excellent questions. It's been a great opportunity to continue to talk through the progress we are making on the strategic vision we shared at Investor Day. It's truly an inspiring time for our company, and we're focused more than ever as we continue to lean into our biggest opportunities. We're in an extraordinary position to continue growing, innovating and leading for the future of entertainment. Thank you all, and speak to you next quarter.

Operator, Operator

That concludes today's meeting. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.