Don’t call it hiding anything, just call it select data provisioning! Electronic Arts COO and CFO Blake Jorgensen has said that future earnings reports from the company will be excluding daily and monthly active user numbers from the company’s earnings reports in the interest of providing data that investors care about.
The move was mentioned during a quarterly investor Q&A, and was explained by Jorgensen as a move to cull “metrics that don’t make sense” for investors. “We’re not necessarily trying to hold back any information, we’re not signaling anything. We just realized that we want to make sure you’re not doing something with numbers that don’t make sense,” says Jorgensen.
The move is similar to one made by Microsoft in September of last year, which argued that MAUs will only have “greater volatility […] going forward as new content and services are introduced” by the company and that the metric provides an incomplete picture of a platform’s performance. It’s also a similar rationale to the one given by Activision-Blizzard when it switched from reporting subscriptions to the heavily obfuscated studio-wide MAUs.
