EA CEO Andrew Wilson says NFTs are not something the company is “driving on”, just three months after calling NFTs and blockchain “the future of our industry”
Context & Ripple Effects
Andrew Wilson's walk-back lands on the same day EA reported its Q3 results, where revenue grew but net income fell sharply to $66M from $211M — a quarter where management had little appetite for a roadmap item its own rank and file rejected. Just weeks earlier, VICE reporting captured developers at EA, Zynga, and Ubisoft describing internal turmoil over executive plans to put crypto and NFTs into games.
Wilson is not retreating alone so much as breaking ranks: days before this statement, Ubisoft executives were still calling NFTs a paradigm shift players simply didn't understand. The split between publisher C-suites and their studios was already public — this is the first visible executive capitulation on the EA side.
First-order effects
- EA's public position flips from blockchain evangelism to non-pursuit, aligning Wilson's external messaging with the internal developer opposition VICE documented weeks later in the same cycle.
Second-order effects
- Ubisoft, Zynga, and other publishers still committed to NFT plans lose their most prominent US advocate and face intensified scrutiny from both players and their own employees over why they haven't followed.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds through what Polygon later chronicled as a disastrous year for NFT-based games, blockchain features stop being a mainstream publisher roadmap item and consolidate into a niche corner of the market — with executive credibility on 'the future of our industry' claims permanently discounted.
The trend: Major game publishers are abandoning NFT roadmaps under combined player backlash and internal developer revolt, leaving early corporate evangelists isolated.