EA's Quarterly Profits Down 31%

On the heels of announced layoffs, Electronic Arts reported reduced profits for the just-ended quarter. From the Gamespot article: "Whether the layoffs propped up EA's stock is debatable, as its share price lost over 2 percent of its value, $1.18. Trading was heavy indeed--twice normal volume, in fact, with 7.3 million shares changing hands. And no wonder: Shortly after the US markets closed, EA announced its earnings for its third fiscal quarter, which ran from October to December 2005. Besides being of great import to stockholders in the world's biggest third-party publisher, the report was seen by many as being a bellwether of the game industry's overall health."

Comments

Fancy that

[el_womble]

So, selling upgrades as new products has finally been recognised by the general public, who are now tired of the EA tax every year?

Thats one option. The other is that they just slashed the price of most of their PS2 and XBox titles in an effort to maintain sales during the transition to XBox 360 and PS3.

The answer: stop working your staff into an early grave working on games that 10 years ago they wouldn't havae touched with a barge pole.

The implemented solution will be to release John Madden 2008 and FIFA 2008 in the summer of 2006 for the XBox Spinning Top and PS4 for $200 in an attempt to gazump its competitors. There will of course be collatoral damage, and a new record will be set with a EA developer dying from stress and fatigue before he's even been conceived.

quick fix!

[typidemon]

Don't release crappy games!

They treat their customers like shit

[Aceticon]

EA is the worse company in the industry in terms of the way how they treat their customers.

Just look at the whole mess around BF2 (Battlefield 2) - they had a game with the potential to be the BEST FPS of the decade an what did they do:
- Rushed it out the door with many bugs, unoptimized code (you need 2GB memory to be able to play it properly) and unbalanced gameplay (unbeatable airpower anyone?).
- Did not release a proper fix for several months. Even now it's still an unbalanced hog of a game.
- Instead of fixing the game, they invested their resources into getting a (payed) game expansion released after just a couple of months. This actually made the game even more demanding in terms of system resources and less stable. A second expansion is scheduled to come out this month.
- The game expansion added new weapons that could also be used in normal maps. Said weapons were more powerfull than the ones available to players with only the original version of the game, thus meaning that those with the expansion had a built-in gameplay advantage. This is pretty much the sleaziest way to push an expansion i've ever seen in this industry.
- All the while, any support requests registered in their site were magically going to the status "solved" without them actually solving anything.

Basically these guys keep treating their whole client base as (fanboy) teenagers and kids (which a lot of them are), while the demographics of gamers has been steadily changing in the last decade and the 25-35 year old males now form one of (if not the) biggest group of gamers.

Notice that 25-35 year olds have a lot more disposable income than teenages and kids ....

Meanwhile the rest of the industry has actually moved out of the 1990s mentality of "people are used to games that crash so we can rush them out the door"...

I am not surprised at all that EA's profits are significantly down.

Still, i hardly expect that EA's management will take the blame - i'm sure that, somehow, it was all due to software piracy ...

Re:They treat their customers like shit

[X0563511]

"- The game expansion added new weapons that could also be used in normal maps. Said weapons were more powerfull than the ones available to players with only the original version of the game, thus meaning that those with the expansion had a built-in gameplay advantage. This is pretty much the sleaziest way to push an expansion i've ever seen in this industry."

Sounds kinda like what MS did with MechWarrior 4. For example:

I own MW4: Vengeance, and make a game for the public to join. What happens? People who bought the "mech packs" can come on into MY virgin game and use their vehicles and weapons that I, the friggin host of the game, can't.

Used to be my favorite game. Stopped playing after that one (mostly because for some reason nobody released rips on the networks)

Re:They treat their customers like shit

[aaronl]

Sounds like exactly what EA did with C&C Generals. I never bought another EA game after that pathetic attempt at release software. You couldn't even reliably *play* a network game, so it was pretty difficult to worry about cheating. Every patch broke some other aspect of the game, and every other introduced some new and more annoying DRM infection. The next patch would remove the DRM so that people could play the game.

The other biggie, Ubisoft, is just as bad. I had to actually block all traffic to Ubisoft's servers so that I could play Raven Shield. It would attempt to communicate with their servers to "authorize" the network game, but if my Internet link was down it would just stop the game every 10 seconds or so while the attempt timed out.

After those two little brushes with the stupidity of EA and Ubisoft, both of them guaranteed that I won't be purchasing from them.

YES

[StarKruzr]

DIE, YOU FUCKERS. DIE FOR KILLING EARTH AND BEYOND.

That said, I sincerely hope the programmers working there get new jobs ASAP. But, yes. EA fucking sucks.

Thanks, EA, for killing two of my favorite franchises - Command and Conquer (whose universe EnB was set in, interestingly) and Wing Commander. You damn dirty apes.

Re:YES

[Anonymous Coward]

While of course, EA is evil, beats its wife and kicks puppies, I believe a small contributing factor to the demise of E&B was the fact it had, like, 11 subscribers.

Too busy playing to buy new stuff?

[Nice2Cats]

Given the number of people I know who have become addicted to Civ IV -- not an EA game, I think -- I am not surprised: They are not out there buying more games as usual. This has made me wonder if there could ever be a "game to end all games", one that is so good that you spend so much time playing it that other games die of attention starvation, and their companies with them. Think of all the time people still spend playing Starcraft. Is that the reason why there has never been a new version, they are afraid it will be too good?

Me, I'm still busy with NetHack. But once I finish that -- any day now, really, or next week the latest -- I might take a look at this new-fangled stuff...

"game to end all games"

[HoneyBunchesOfGoats]

World of Warcraft? That $15/month * 5.5 million could have purchased a large number of EA games.

Re:Microsoft Will Feel EA's Wrath

[radish]

Where on earth did you get all that from? Firstly, what are these "seemingly endless disasters" with the 360? They can't make them fast enough to satisfy demand, but what's new there with a console launch? Other than that and one game (DOA4) missing it's launch window - what's the problem? The japan issue really doesn't affect EA much, as Madden is hardly a big seller outside of the US.

This is the second time in a few months that EA management has specifically and publicly expressed their extreme displeasure with Microsoft and the 360.

Quote? Here's mine, from the CEO yesterday:

"We also had a successful launch on the Xbox 360 and expect that we will be the number one publisher on this platform in 2006"

Outside of some of the bigger sports titles, 360 projects are getting canceled at EA.

Really? Name one.

EA's management loved putting Microsoft in their place when they very publicly ignored the Xbox online service.

Now you're smoking. EA ignored XBL originally for sure, but the roar of disapproval from actual players was audible even in EA central. Guess what? Everything they do is now XBL enabled and has been for some time. Way to "stick it to the man". Please.

Their Harry Potter Goblet of Fire game also sucked

[Anonymous Coward]

Go read the reviews for this PC game on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 9YJM9W/002-6493180-4009643?v=glance

Seriously, it is about 99 out of 100 negative. I wish I had read those reviews before I bought it for my kids. The previous three HP games they made were very decent. This 4th one was awful. The worst thing about it was the way in which the game maintains a helicopter eye's view of everything. Instead of feeling like you are part of the action, it feels like you are watching somebody else play the game.

My kids have played the first 3 EA Harry Potter games hundreds of times and never tire of them. This 4th one, they barely touch after seeing how bad it is. I was assuming that the company just issued a clunker or was just fucking over their HP fans, whom they felt they could take for granted, in this one situation. But reading the other posts here, it is clear that their quality must have gone down across the board.