EA Earnings
From Gamespot:For the three months ended September 30, 2006, Electronic Arts racked up total revenues of $784 million, a jump of 16 percent over 2005's second-quarter haul of $675 million. The publisher attributed the numbers to the launch of the latest installments of its annual sports games--Madden NFL 07, NCAA Football 07, FIFA 07, NBA Live 07, and NHL 07.
...Broken down by platform, the increase was attributable to gains in the Xbox 360 and mobile sectors. The $166 million brought in by EA's Xbox 360 games accounted for 21 percent of the company's total revenue, and more than made up for declines in the current-gen platforms.
...While Electronic Arts' revenues for the quarter broke records, its net profits did not. Last year the publisher posted bottom-line gains of $51 million; this year it had to settle for a take-home of $22 million.
That all sounds pretty positive, unless you note that revenue is up 16% while profits are down 56%. However, they also had $33 million in stock option costs due to new regulatory requirements for how employee options are handled, and that's not unique to EA.
Does this mean they've righted the ship? I don't know. They certainly haven't righted it in a quality sense--if anything, their quality has gone down even further this year. But they are selling games, even if they're bad ones.
Of course, it wouldn't be EA if I didn't see something else about them in the same day. Like this:
EA Crams $50 Worth of Codes in NFS: Carbon
You read that right --$50 to save you the trouble of unlocking content via play.
First it was Tiger Woods. Then it was The Godfather. Now Need For Speed: Carbon is the latest EA title offering to make unlocking in-game content as easy as a microtransaction. If you have a 360, forget about playing to unlock the content, you can log onto the XBL Marketplace and pay to grant you access to the content, saving you time and... time.
You can still proceed the old fashion way, earning the content through playing the game, though. And EA wants you to know that, because all of these unlocks like the Performance Handling and Performance Drive Train bundles include this important descriptor text: "Many of the items in this bundle can be achieved without purchase by progressing through Career, Challenge Series and Reward Card."
Wow. Even as a cynic, I'm still shocked by the sheer scope of that naked profiteering. Fifty dollars to unlock everything? So that means this game could actually cost you $109.99?
Just pay attention to that phrase "many of the items in this bundle can be achieved without purchase..." That's how they'll start out, but over the course of the next year, more and more content will only be purchaseable, not unlockable.
That's a train with a full head of speed, and it's going to run over us.
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