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.

I will never buy another EA game

[INeededALogin]

I looked forward to playing Madden on my PSP. Which turned out to be one of the buggiest games ever released. The game crashed repeatedly and the load times were unbearable. It would even tease you and make you think that the load times were over at some points. Now, the load times are mostly Sony's fault(UMD is slow), but the crashing of the game was inexcusable and I stopped playing this after the first night I owned it.

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

[BenjyD]

I gave up playing BF2 a while back because of all the problems I had with it: crashes, poor performance, lag, bugs. When I heard about the paid expansions I vowed to never go back to the game again. Wizards of the Coast etc. have been getting away with that kind of crap for years, I won't support it in video games as well.

In five years of console gaming I haven't had to suffer a single bug - why should PC gamers put up with it?

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

[Antony.S]

You left out they have already planned a third expansion pack, there have only been two or three patches for the game since release!

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.

Allright!

[onlysolution]

Maybe EA will realize they can't work their Devs to death rehashing old games and still keep people interested. Maybe MS will start making a *nix OS. Maybe pigs will sprout wings. It's a strange world we live in after all.

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

[DDLKermit007]

It was a short lived space MMORPG Bret Sperry wanted to do partialy because of his addiction to Everquest at the time (the man had 4 PCs he played the Evercrack on that I heard about during the 15 year aniversary party). I however know of NO connection to the C&C Universe & Earth & Beyond and I worked at Westwood up till a few months near "The End." Wiki below...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_%26_Beyond

Re:YES

[DDLKermit007]

Well C&C: Generals was not done by real Westwood Employees (Las Vegas), but the Irvine office EA got when they bought Westwood from Virgin (they were Virgin Interactive...theres some bad blood there). Westwood Las Vegas died and the Irvine office got to do Generals. They also did Red Alert: 2 and Yuris Revenge, but they did a good job on those though. If your looking for some more of that beautiful Westwood quality RTS look no further than Petroglyph Studios (Ex-WW Las Vegas Employees) who are doing Star Wars: Empire at War and damn is it beautiful. http://www.petroglyphgames.com/games/starwars.php

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...

I blame the internet

[Freaky Spook]

I blame the internet on dodgy game releases now that require constant patching, playing games 10 years ago the titles did have their problems, but they were no where near as buggy as they are these days, it seems like developers know they can release titles with bugs & expect the general public to do their testing so they can patch the holes later.

Im not looking forward to the PS3 with online, I buy a console because I know I won't have to worry about game patching, it looks likes thats all about to change.I just hope the sony online service doesn't charge a service fee for me to update buggy games.

It's all because Godfather was delayed

[Jarnis]

Their profits tanked, because their 'biggest' christmas title, Godfather, was delayed. Apparently it was so buggy and incomplete that even EA could not hash together a shippable build in time for holidays, and now it's been pushed back to late spring.

One 'major' title is easily 20-30% of their bottom line in a quarter.

Now the reason why they aren't improving otherwise is because they treat their customers like shit, and are ran by clueless idiots that chase the quick buck over long-term sales and customer loyalty - bit like every other megacorp on the planet.

"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.