EA Quarterly report

[kjcheezhead]

http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/...efields-sales/

Gamepro has an article about EA turning a corner and making a profit in their last quarter.

After hearing about Online Pass and the reactions today, I kind of chuckled when I read John Riccitiello's quote:

"We are rebuilding EA's reputation with consumers."



Lol, don't know about that, but at least he can be happy his company made a profit for the first time in a while.

[canes21]

Are you kidding me? This online pass has me tickled to death!

[dark_warhawk]

so EA lost 667 million instead of 1.1 billion and this is considered "turning the corner" only in this country can this be considered good news.

[RubenDouglas]

crazy world. EA still making millions/billions yet investors still unhappy. These developers have it hard.

[beastwork]

I'm glad you started this thread I've been meaning to post a little chart that shows the results of EA's 2009 annual report. well at least the parts that gamer's would be interested in.



For what its worth. It's not necessarily specific to the madden franchise but I think its fair to assume that the message from the top of the company drove this data.

So a quick and un-scientific analysis would show that over the last 3 years EA has increased marketing spending at a much higher rate than R&D spending . Unfortunately for EA, more marketing has not generated a corresponding increase in sales.

anyway, I thought it was interesting.





edit for clarity
I probably should have clarified this.

the graph is not showing spending in dollars. its comparing how much spending has grown vs 2007. So think of it like this - Marketing spending has increased 49%, R&D has increased only increased 31%, and net income has increased 36%. It shows that the business model is skewed towards marketing the hell out of games and less towards game development (at least over the last 3 years).

[achain]

I like the idea that EA spends more money on marketing their products than actually developing them.

Is it a coincidence that the quality of their games has been on the decline the last few years? It's impossible to know for sure, but this certainly doesn't help.

[kehlis]

That's an interesting graph, do you know if there is a breakdown by game? I would be curious to see what it would look like for specific games...

[mestevo]

Annual figures look bad due in part to a poor economy though, they made a profit in the 4th quarter and beat estimates.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...ness_whatsNews