After EA appointed Andrew Wilson as chief executive last year, longtime exec Frank Gibeau moved over from the EA Games Label to become executive vice president of EA Mobile. EA has more than 800 games in its mobile catalog, but it can’t beat some of the luckiest and smartest rivals in the category, like Supercell, the maker of Clash of Clans, or Candy Crush Saga publisher King.
The Simpsons Tapped Out
That’s partly because EA’s mobile business, which it acquired in the Jamdat acquisition of 2005, started in feature phones and migrated to paid apps on smartphones. Only recently has EA begun to learn how to make free-to-play mobile games and operate them as live services. Gibeau wants EA to churn out dozens of prototypes a year, with teams as small as three people making a working mobile game in just three weeks. But EA will be disciplined about what it ships, reducing that number to about 12 a year. That will give EA plenty of shots and a chance to churn out games such as The Simpsons: Tapped Out, a mobile game that has monetized extremely well.
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Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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