Andrea Hopelain, Senior Vice President, Brand, EA SPORTS & RACING at Electronic Arts, sits down with Yahoo Finance Live to talk about the growing number of women in gaming, how women are represented in the space and games themselves, and ways to make gaming more inclusive going forward.

Video Transcript

- From tabletops to virtual reality, video games changing with the times for sure. Let's break down some of those top trends in the world of sports and gaming with our next guest. We've got Andrea Hopelain who is the sports and racing brand senior vice president over at Electronic Arts. And also summoned into the chat here, we've got to bring in Yahoo Finance's own Dan Howley.

All right, so let's get right into it here. And Andrea, great to have you here with us on the day. First and foremost, when we think about where we sit in the current trends in the world of sports and gaming, there's been a ton of focus on what the metaverse could mean for sports and gaming. But as of right now, where are you seeing some of the core gamers, some of the end users continue to gravitate towards the experiences that companies like EA are coming up with?

ANDREA HOPELAIN: Thanks for having me. Um, it's a really exciting moment to be inside of the intersection of sports, gaming, and interactive entertainment. Over half of the world is gaming now.

And excitingly, more than 50% of that is female. Our gamers are looking for increasing, um, ways to connect with sport through the diversity of experiences that we offer, through competition, through play, through watching, social connection. We're sitting at a really white hot intersection of all of these trends.

DAN HOWLEY: Andrea, this is Dan. I want to talk to you about, you know, obviously, this being Women's History Month, about women and gaming. Obviously, women make up, you know I mean, roughly half of the gaming cohort, whether that's any kind of genre you can think of. I want to talk specifically, though, about EA Sports and how women are, you know, playing in that space and how EA is working to bring more women into the area as well.

ANDREA HOPELAIN: Yeah. As I mentioned, you know, we have more than 50% of our audience at Electronic Arts today is female. And we need these diverse voices and we want to meet the diverse voices of our player population. You know, it's really powerful to see yourself represented in the world and through the experiences.

And, you know, when I think about how powerful it was for me growing up as a soccer player to look up to the women's national team and see what I can become, I think about the role we play at EA Sports today and how we are mentoring and entering fans into sport through games. And so you can't underestimate the role and the power that we have in representing the diversity and participation in sport today and we're really meeting that ambition with our actions.