Electronic Arts Inc.
Q4 2015 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 6 May 2015

[Operator:]

Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. Now I will turn the meeting over to Mr. Chris Evenden, Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin.

[Chris Evenden:]

Thank you, Jen. Welcome to EA's fiscal 2015 fourth quarter earnings call. With me on the call today are Andrew Wilson, our CEO, Blake Jorgensen, our CFO. Frank Gibeau, our EVP of Mobile, and Peter Moore, our COO, will be joining us for the Q&A portion of the call. Please note that our SEC filings and our earnings release are available at ir.ea.com. In addition, we have posted 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. A couple of quick notes on our calendar; the date of our next earnings call will be Thursday, July 30. And our E3 press conference 1

[Andrew P. Wilson:]

Thanks, Chris, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. FY 2015 was an exceptional year for Electronic Arts. With a clear focus on putting our players first, we delivered new experiences that were award winners, global best-sellers, and breakout hits. Our live services for franchises like Battlefield, FIFA, Madden NFL, and The Sims are thriving. The communities in our mobile titles continue to grow. And through constant dialogue, we are forging deeper relationships with our players. We broadened our portfolio on key platforms, introduced new service models, and delivered quality through stable, scalable, and innovative experiences. All of this contributed to outstanding player engagement in EA experiences across console, PC, and mobile in FY 2015. Our financial results were consistently strong throughout the year. Revenue and EPS were above our guidance for the full fiscal year, and we have reached an all-time high in operating cash flow. EA today is performing with focus and efficiency, and we're leaning into our strengths to deliver great experiences to a growing and diverse audience of players around the world. Dragon Age

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

Thanks, Andrew. As Andrew mentioned, we had another great quarter and a phenomenal 12 months. Before going into the details, I'd like to step back and consider the journey we've been on for the last couple of years. When we first started talking about improving the performance of Electronic Arts, I suggested it would take three years to double our non-GAAP operating margins from 10% to 20%. We've exceeded that in two years. In fact, at nearly 25%, our fiscal 2015 operating margin is over 500 basis points above our guidance at the beginning of the year and at its highest point in over a decade. We've dramatically increased our efficiency. Non-GAAP operating expenses are down a full 10 percentage points, from 56% of net revenue in FY 2013 to just 46% in FY 2015. And we've done so without adversely impacting our revenue or the effectiveness of our R&D or marketing. This year we delivered the best Dragon Age of all time, grew our sports franchises, expanded a core franchise with Battlefield Hardline, and announced new IP, including Star Wars Battlefront. In addition, we've continued to grow our digital live services and leveraged our IP portfolio to establish a strong position on mobile platforms. Our core product catalog and digital live services are helping the company deliver more consistent, repeatable revenue and cash flow each year. These improvements have more than quadrupled our free cash flow over the same period, from $218 million in FY 2013 to $972 million in FY 2015, and driven a threefold increase in non-GAAP diluted EPS, from $0.84 a share to $2.51 a share. But there's plenty of road left to travel on our journey to build both great games and shareholder value. Most significantly, the digital transformation sweeping the whole industry is still in its infancy. This transformation presents opportunity to continue to grow margins by increasing the proportion of full-game downloads, by providing extra content for games, and by taking our IP to mobile platforms. Downloads of our games for current-generation consoles continue to increase. Meanwhile, our extra content and subscription strategy generated $1.3 billion in net revenue in FY 2015 and continues to grow strongly. Finally, our mobile business at $524 million is now the third-largest in western markets and the eighth-largest worldwide, and we anticipate continued healthy growth going forward. As well as driving gross margin improvement, we continue to look for opportunities to better leverage our investments. For example, our digital platform strategy will help us better understand and engage with gamers for more efficiency. And standardizing on one game engine across studios amortizes core technology development across all our titles and accelerates our innovation. Bottom line, we believe we can continue to grow non-GAAP EPS into the future. Moving to the fourth quarter results, EA's non-GAAP net revenue was $896 million, which was $66 million above our guidance and $18 million below last year. The quarter's outperformance was driven by sales of Battlefield Hardline and the ongoing strength of our catalog titles. In addition, our mobile business continued to grow, led by SimCity BuildIt, Madden NFL Mobile, The Sims FreePlay, and The Simpsons

[Andrew P. Wilson:]

Thanks, Blake. We are entering a new global age for games, with a growing audience that spends more time playing games across more platforms than ever before. New consoles are being adopted faster than the last generation. Mobile continues its global expansion. New delivery and business models are poised to break through on consoles and PC, and there's huge innovation happening in game experiences across every platform. Players are at the center of this new era, and our focus is on building long-lasting relationships. As humans, we all need entertainment. For our players, we are delivering the best form of entertainment. Through amazing new games, dynamic and enduring live services, vibrant communities, and meaningful dialogue, we are enabling their passion for inspiration, immersion, competition, social connection, and fun. The passion we have for that opportunity, to lead this new age of gaming built around our global audience of players, is what will drive us in FY 2016 and beyond. With that, Blake, Peter, Frank, and I are here for your questions.

[Operator:]

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Our first question comes from Colin Sebastian of Robert Baird. Go ahead, sir, your line is open.

[Colin A. Sebastian:]

Great, thanks, good afternoon, congrats to each of you. I guess first off maybe for Blake, with all the progress and the success to date on managing expenses, I can only imagine that there's some pressure to invest more, given all the growth opportunity. Can you talk a little bit about the ability to keep expenses roughly flat, adjusting for the FX impact, and if that's a realistic expectation in future years? And then secondly, maybe Peter can add some color on the specific impact you're seeing on Ultimate Team on FIFA with the pricing changes and the transfer market resurgence.

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

So thanks, Colin. The first question on our guidance for OpEx, we're actually saying, as we said in the script, roughly $100 million of investment that we're making. It's flat because of obviously the FX impact on our international based investments. I think we're making substantial investments in new IP, in mobile IP, in our game engine to try to continue to expand cross-buy across multiple products and in our underlying infrastructure. We're continuing to focus on making marketing more efficient and effective by leveraging our digital connection with our consumers, and that will benefit us in our marketing expenses. But I guarantee we'll continue to support our brands in a fairly healthy way. I think we're making the right investments going forward and it will continue to help drive the top line of the business and the effectiveness of our products.

[Peter Robert Moore:]

Colin, it's Peter. Just on Ultimate Team, as Blake said in his commentary, FIFA Ultimate Team expanded 40%, and Madden NFL Ultimate Team more than doubled. So overall Ultimate Team grew 53%, and that's on top of the previous year when it grew 62%. As you know and you're aware when you track it, that we did put some measures in place, outlined by both Andrew and Blake, to look at some of the more nefarious actions that were going on. We continue to monitor that, keep a very close eye on what's going on, trying to balance the economy, keep some of the coin sellers out. But we have great optimism that our growth in Ultimate Team will continue going forward in FY 2016 and beyond.

[Colin A. Sebastian:]

Okay, thanks very much.

[Peter Robert Moore:]

Thanks, Colin.

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

Next question.

[Operator:]

Our next question comes from Justin Post of Merrill Lynch. Go ahead, your line is open.

[Justin Post:]

Great, thank you. Obviously, a lot of anticipation into Star Wars. Can you give us any thoughts on how you've incorporated that into your guidance, how it might affect gross profit? And is there going to be a marketing benefit from that title given all the hype around the movie? Thank you.

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

Yeah, we certainly hope that we can leverage a lot of the hype. We certainly have done that so far, and we've got a great partner in Disney and Lucasfilm on that. They're very excited for our title as well. For us, we're thinking about it with two bookends. One bookend is the historical Battlefront, which did roughly 9 million units. The other bookend is our core first-person shooter franchise of Battlefield, which typically does around 15 million units. So I think in our guidance, we've roughly put in there roughly 9 million to 10 million units for the title, with we believe some upside obviously if things goes well. It is Gen-4-only and PC, and so that needs to get factored into people's thinking, but it is a very exciting title. It will put, as we said in the script, some pressure on gross margin in the quarter. We've been trying to target 100 basis points of gross margin improvement, and this year we're forecasting roughly 50 basis points, and much of that is due to the fact that there's a royalty on that to Disney. And at a level of 10 million units, that's a fairly large pressure on gross. So we're very optimistic and excited about the title. And obviously, the market has been the same way as the feedback we've seen from recently the Disney Celebration, where we showed the title for the first time. We'll obviously show it more at E3. And so everyone will get a chance to start to appreciate the depth and the excitement around it.

[Justin Post:]

Thank you and congrats on the execution last year.

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

Thanks.

[Operator:]

Our next question comes from Stephen Ju of Credit Suisse. Go ahead, sir, your line is open. Stephen Ju - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker) So, Andrew or Peter, some of your competitors showed off what I thought was a pretty interesting piece of technology, which allows streaming of game content from either the smartphone or the tablet onto the TV. So this obviously creates some interesting opportunities for you as a publisher to take stuff off the console. So is this an area of focus for you right now, or should we expect some of your less graphics-intense titles you're shipping currently with the console releases at some point in the future? And secondarily, how much data are you collecting from all of your users just broadly? And where do you think you are in terms of using that data to influence your content development? Thanks.

[Andrew P. Wilson:]

Okay, I'll take that, two great questions. One as it relates to streaming, streaming is a technology that's still in its infancy, I would say. Certainly, we have a few incubation efforts going on around the company to see how best we can benefit from that. But as you think about our core objective, which is to build more relationships with more players across more platforms around the world, streaming certainly represents an opportunity for us. Lots of work to go there in order to deliver the kinds of experiences we believe our players want to play, but certainly we have efforts going on. As it relates to data collection, we are collecting – I heard one stat once that we collect more data on a daily basis than the combined U.S. Library of Congress, which as you can imagine, is a lot of data. At a more core level, what we're starting to understand better about our players is how engagement works, how engagement works where a player engages on more than one platform, how engagement works where a player plays more than one franchise, and the effect of engagement over the long term as it relates to the likelihood that a player will continue and buy the next version of a title provided we can keep them playing over time. So there's a lot in our data right now as it relates to our players. We are using that data

[Operator:]

Our next question comes from Chris Merwin of Barclays. Go ahead, your line is open.

[Chris Merwin:]

Great, thank you. So just in the context of your guidance for 2016, Blake, I think you talked about 10% growth for the extra content business, and I think a lot of that might have been coming from FIFA Online in China. Can you quantify at all what you're expecting in terms of dollars for FIFA Online in China? Or maybe asked another way, do you think this could be bigger than FIFA Online in Korea? And then secondly on the Mobile business, I don't know if you can give out a margin for that business. But are you seeing stability in that margin or even improvement as you roll out this more branded IP? I imagine that relative to competitors, you might even have lower sales and marketing costs for mobile given that you are leveraging branded IP that has a built-in audience and I imagine would lower the cost of customer acquisition. Thanks.

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

Yeah, so let me start on FIFA Online 3 China, and then I'll have Frank address the mobile economics. On FIFA Online 3 China, as we said, we did not recognize any revenue in Q4 for that. We will start recognizing revenue in Q1, this quarter, which will include the revenue that we generated last year for that title. It will roughly be around $40 million this quarter. I think going forward for your models, I'd probably focus on $10 million to $15 million a quarter. And as that business grows, we'll keep you updated. We're very optimistic about it. Tencent has been very public around their optimism. But we remind people it's taken us three to four years to grow Korea to where it is today, and Korea is a more fluid market than China right now, and so it's probably going to take some time. Also, soccer is much more prevalent in Korea than it is in China, but it's growing fast in China, so we hope to follow that. So, it's a longer story for us, we think, but I think there's a lot of potential and everything is going very well. Frank, on the mobile?

[Frank D. Gibeau:]

The question on mobile I'll take. When we look at how Electronic Arts is constructing its mobile businesses, a couple of key competitive advantages that we're trying to harness. And the first is we have the broadest and most diverse and powerful portfolio of brands in the business, and that translates into very strong organic acquisition advantages. So pound for pound, people have heard of SimCity, The Sims, the products like FIFA and Madden. And organically they install at very high rates. If you looked at how SimCity did over the break, we were generating tens of millions of installs without really spending any money in paid acquisition. That's also combined with a really powerful network that we're designing. So it allows us to cross-promote and understand based on telemetry and data what our gamers are doing at any given time and what's the right message at the right time and what are the right games that we can put in front of them that might interest them. So the combination of a profound organic acquisition advantage coming from brand power and a network effect we believe will allow us from a long-term standpoint keep marketing and sales as a percentage of revenue very low, very low certainly relative to other mobile game companies. And as we look to grow the business, we'll continue to harness those advantages.

[Chris Merwin:]

All right, thank you.

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

Next question.

[Operator:]

Our next question comes from Arvind Bhatia of Sterne Agee CRT. Go ahead, your line is open.

[Arvind Bhatia:]

Thank you and I'd like to add my congratulations, guys, a couple of quick ones. Just going back to the FIFA Online 3 China question, we got the revenue guidance. I would assume that most of that revenue comes in at pretty full margin. I'm wondering if you could maybe comment on that. And then you touched on EA Access. I'm wondering if you can maybe elaborate a little bit more how we should think about the adoption rates right now. What are some of the puts and takes there? And then lastly, Andrew, I would love to get your views on the overall market, the console market in particular, over the next couple of years. We see your breakdown of the physical versus digital revenue. I'm just wondering how you think about the progression over the next couple of years. Thank you.

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

Thanks, Arvind. On FIFA Online 3, we don't disclose obviously the profitability of the individual lines of business. But what you should assume there is Tencent is essentially delivering the product and doing much of the marketing in the local market. We're doing the product development and helping Tencent on any issues around hosting and delivering the product. So we obviously have product development costs. We don't have some of the marketing costs that you'd see in our normal business. So you should assume that it's good profit margins, but that's about as far as I can go on that. On EA Access, we're extremely pleased with the growth of EA Access. As I said on the call, we haven't really started to promote that with Microsoft. We will this summer. We've now added – we've got 12 titles in the vault. And that's why we feel like it's a great time to start to promote it because much of the value is around those titles in the vault. The subscriber base continues to grow. It's still not a meaningful part of our financials, and thus we're not calling out the actual numbers or the stats, but we will consider that in the future as we see how it grows. But overall, we're very interested in it and we're learning a great deal from the service around players' interest in subscription models and where they get the most value out of the service. I'll let Andrew catch the last one on consoles.

[Andrew P. Wilson:]

Overall, we're very happy with the speed at which this console generation has been taken up by players. As we talked about in the prepared notes, it's much faster than the last generation. We would expect close to 50 million consoles by the end of the year, and that's a meaningful install base for us to build games for. And the level of engagement we're seeing on a per-game basis is also very, very high, with people engaging in the live services that we're building around our games for much, much longer than before. As we think about retail versus full-game downloads, certainly we've seen growth in that area. It varies from geography to platform. But on a Gen-4 game like Battlefield Hardline, in the West we're seeing nearly 20% numbers, and we would expect that growth to continue. We've seen a dramatic increase in PC downloads since 2010. And we believe the same forces that drove this in PC are at play on this latest generation of consoles. And so as bandwidth increases, lower-cost storage increases, we would expect continued growth in this area.

[Arvind Bhatia:]

Great.

[Andrew P. Wilson:]

We always give this stat on every call. We're up 51% over the same period in Gen-4 versus Gen-3. So 17 months since launch the install base of Gen-4 consoles is now up 51% versus the same period for Gen-3.

[Arvind Bhatia:]

Great. Thanks, Peter. Thank you, guys.

[Andrew P. Wilson:]

Thank you.

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

Next question.

[Operator:]

Our next question comes from Mike Olson of Piper Jaffray. Go ahead, your line is open.

[Michael J. Olson:]

Hey, good afternoon. Just to follow on regarding the full-game downloads, you mentioned 20% on games like Battlefield. Are you trying to accelerate that as fast as you can because it's better margin, or are there reasons to take it slowly? I guess in other words, are there risks to a rapid transition to full-game downloads, or are you just putting the pedal down on pushing that as fast as you can? And then secondly, regarding the pipeline, we noticed Titanfall is not in your announced title slate as of now. Does that mean that it won't ship in fiscal 2016, or does that mean that it may or may not ship in the year, but would currently be an unannounced title if it were a fiscal 2016 launch?

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

So first on full-game downloads, we're essentially allowing the consumer to vote. We would like the consumer to consume games where they want to consume them. And if that's in full-game downloads or if that's in retail, we want to be there. We've got great partners in retail. GameStop, Target, Walmart, Game (45

[Michael J. Olson:]

All right, thanks a lot.

[Operator:]

Our next question comes from Drew Crum from Stifel. Go ahead, your line is open.

[Drew E. Crum:]

Okay, thanks. Good afternoon, everyone. So I just want to go back to FIFA. You guys talked about a lot of the puts and takes that will contribute to results in fiscal 2016. If you take a step back, you're comping against the World Cup last year. What are your expectations for the franchise maybe on a constant currency basis or a headline number? And then separately as it relates to Star Wars, you mentioned that you're going to be publishing on Gen-4 only. Is that a strategy you intend to employ across other franchises going forward? Thanks.

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

So, Drew, on FIFA, we expect continued growth in that franchise. Obviously, at the size that franchise is now, the law of large numbers makes big growth numbers difficult. But we've continually year in and year out been able to grow FIFA by improving the quality of the game, by adding extra additional services around the game like Ultimate Team, and driving into continued new geographies around the world. The popularity of football in America continues to grow, and that's been fueling the growth of the product here in the U.S., even though it's always been very strong internationally, and we think we'll continue to see that. So we're very optimistic about FIFA and we hope to see that continue to see upside growth, and that's what's built into our forecast. Your second question was...

[Drew E. Crum:]

As far as Star Wars is concerned...

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

Thanks. So we will see a slow movement away from Gen-3. As a reminder, we've been making Gen-2 console games up until the last year or so. For some of our bigger franchises like our sports franchises, we'll continue to make Gen-3. But we're making some decisions on new franchises and titles to focus on Gen-4, partially because the power of the platform allows for exceptional gameplay and incredible graphics. And for something like Star Wars, we wanted to make sure that we provided the highest level of quality for the game experience, and you can do that only on Gen-4 and PC.

[Drew E. Crum:]

Okay, thanks, guys.

[Operator:]

Our next question comes from Ben Schachter of Macquarie. Go ahead, sir, your line is open. Benjamin Schachter - Macquarie Capital (USA), Inc. Hi, guys, congratulations again on the execution, a few questions for you. First, some very large companies seem to be focusing more and more on virtual reality. Can you talk a little bit how EA is working in that space? And are there meaningful investments there yet, or is it just still too early? And then, if you could, also just describe how FIFA is actually monetized in China, and remind us how the revenue recognition works. And then finally, Blake, I think you said the new $1 billion buyback anticipates returning about 50% of free cash, and then you guided FY 2016 to $1 billion. So does that mean that FY 2017 free cash should be flat with 2016? Thanks.

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

Ben, I love how you do your math. I was not implying at all that 2017 free cash flow was going to be down. I was simply trying to help people understand how we're thinking about return of capital. The goal would be if we were to continue to be able to increase cash flow over time, we would continue to increase our buybacks over time, and we're thinking about that as a two-year program. As you can see, we started a two-year program a year ago, and we replaced that with a new two-year program this year. I'm not predicting what that's going to be for the future, but think about it more like a progression over time versus any guidance around fiscal 2017. Benjamin Schachter - Macquarie Capital (USA), Inc. Got it.

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

I'm very optimistic about 2016 and 2017. So that's that piece. FIFA Online 3 is a free-to-play PC game, which means much like in Ultimate Team, you monetize based on collecting and trading players and playing with those players. You don't have to monetize. You can play the game for free. But like all free-to-play games, to build a better team, to get further ahead in the game, to win against your friends, you will possibly monetize to build that team. The revenue recognition issue was simply a one-time issue for us, and that was we were waiting for the formal rollout of the game in China with our partner Tencent. And that occurred in early April and thus the ability to start to recognize revenue. We did not want to recognize revenue until the game was fully functional, fully rolled out, moved from soft beta to hard beta to full rollout, and it had all the features available for gameplay, and that's why we now start to recognize. But we shouldn't have a recognition issue going forward on that. Benjamin Schachter - Macquarie Capital (USA), Inc. Sorry, I meant recognition. If a player spends a dollar in China, are you booking only the piece that you're getting from Tencent, or are you booking the full dollar?

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

Yes, good question. Yes, we are. Much like we do with mobile, we only book net.

[Andrew P. Wilson:]

On virtual reality, again, I would say that this is a technology that has the potential to profoundly impact our industry over time. I think the notion of immersion as a key motivation that our players are looking to fulfill when they play our games is something that could certainly be well fulfilled through the notion of virtual reality technology. As a company with creative innovation as one of its core pillars, it's very important that we stay ahead of this. And as a result, we have some clear and focused investments in the space. As you will know if you follow this, there are a number of different potential providers and manifestations of virtual reality right now that go everywhere from wearing a pair of goggles to a holographic type experience, or to a room overall that you step into. We are looking at any and all of these things and have a few incubation efforts going on around the company so that as this begins to manifest itself, we are, as a creative and innovative company, able to lead from the front.

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

Next question.

[Operator:]

Our next question comes from Mike Hickey of The Benchmark Company. Go ahead, sir, your line is open.

[Michael Hickey:]

Hey, guys, congrats on a great quarter and year. Enjoy it, you guys have definitely deserved it here.

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

Thanks.

[Michael Hickey:]

A couple questions. I was curious on your capital allocation strategy as it relates to share repurchases and intensifying your effort there when your company's valuation is near an all-time high versus potentially accretive M&A opportunities, particularly as you begin to increase investment in new IP, as you outlined today. And then I have a follow-up.

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

Yeah, so we look at a couple of components when we think about return of capital to shareholders. We first and foremost believe that that's a critical goal of the company is to continue to return capital to shareholders. We balance that with two things

[Michael Hickey:]

All right, fair enough, Blake. Thank you. Last question, you had a few game delays last year, and obviously that happens. And ultimately, you seem to have crafted an advantage from the delay by providing a higher quality product. But curious on Star Wars, how confident you feel today on the development of this game and the anticipated quality as pacing within that desired launch window, seeing that the timing of this drop is perhaps more important given the launch of the movie in December and, as you noted, related marketing benefits hopefully from that. I'm also curious if you plan to have a beta or early release within your EA Access program. Thanks, guys.

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

I'll let Andrew touch on the Star Wars question.

[Andrew P. Wilson:]

So again, as someone who grew up making games in this company, making games is hard, building fun is hard, and getting that right on a day is even harder. And what you saw over the past year was our commitment to players in building great properties and the willingness to make hard decisions around that. With that said, there are any number of things that might contribute to a miss or a need to move a date. As it relates to Star Wars Battlefront, I would say as it stands right now, we feel very, very good about the trajectory and the velocity of the development team. They're building on platforms now that have been in the marketplace for a number of years. They're building on the core engine that has launched a number of products, including Battlefield 4, Battlefield Hardline, Dragon Age

[Michael Hickey:]

Thanks, guys, best of luck.

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

Thank you, next question.

[Operator:]

Our next question comes from Sean McGowan of Needham. Go ahead, sir, your line is open.

[Sean P. McGowan:]

Thank you. I just wanted to circle back on a couple of things mentioned before for clarification. When you were talking about the estimated unit sales of Star Wars, I think you said 9 million to 10 million. Are you talking about in the fiscal year or over the life of the product?

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

In the fiscal year of our guidance.

[Sean P. McGowan:]

Thanks. And I don't know if this would be for Peter or Andrew or Blake, anybody. You said you count a bundle as a physical sale and you're still getting 20% full-game downloads. What would that number look like if you counted that as a digital sale?

[Peter Robert Moore:]

Sean, it's Peter. That varies from quarter to quarter, year to year depending on the bundles. But I want to make it very clear that whether it's a code or a physical disk that goes into a bundle that is primarily put together by our first-party platform partners, that is physical media to us and that's how it's accounted for. Our full-game downloads that you're seeing, they do vary from title and by geography. But the latest data we've got shows us at a 20%-plus for Battlefield Hardline, and that's up from about 13% to 15% this time last year for our AAA title releases. So we're seeing the growth. And as Andrew said, if we stay on a path that's analogous to PC, that will continue to grow over the coming fiscal years.

[Sean P. McGowan:]

Okay, thanks. And then my last question was on the any variability around the June quarter. Considering that there are no major launches, it seems like this might be a quarter where there's not a lot of variance off of the guidance. Is that a fair way to look at it?

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

I'll let you guys look at history and decide that.

[Sean P. McGowan:]

Okay, got to try. Thanks

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

We try our best, guys, to give the best guidance as we can at the moment that we're giving it, so one last question.

[Operator:]

Our last question comes from Brian Pitz of Jefferies. Go ahead, sir. Your line is open.

[Brian J. Pitz:]

Thanks for the question, just a quick Star Wars follow-on. Just curious how DICE is really prepping to ensure the smooth launch of Battlefront, including not only gameplay but also things like connectivity and even various types of IP protection that might be in the works. Basically, are there any out of the ordinary aspects to the game that could cause an unforeseen delay? I know someone else was asking about a delayed timeframe. Just any additional color on out of the ordinary stuff would be great. Thanks.

[Andrew P. Wilson:]

I don't think there's anything out of the ordinary, I think we treat every game launch with security, stability, and scalability of paramount importance. Certainly as we talked about in the prepared comments, we learned a lot coming out of Battlefield 4. We've launched a number of very, very large-scale titles on our infrastructure since then and have performed very, very well by market standards. Dragon Age

[Brian J. Pitz:]

And the reason I ask is just going back to Spore with the DRM limitations back in the past that backfired. With a bigger IP title like this, that's the only reason I'm asking.

[Andrew P. Wilson:]

No, it's a good question, but we don't see anything at this time.

[Brian J. Pitz:]

Thanks.

[Blake J. Jorgensen:]

Great, thank you, everyone.

[Andrew P. Wilson:]

Thank you.

[Chris Evenden:]

Thanks, everyone.

[Operator:]

And this concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.