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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."
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.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
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.
Don't release crappy games!
EA is the worse company in the industry in terms of the way how they treat their customers.
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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
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.
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.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"