My how the mighty have fallen. It's sad (in a way) to see the monolithic third-party giant of the past decade struggling so much. But this has been a long time coming. Remember back in 2007, when a couple of us predicted that EA was going to report a net loss for the first time in ten years? I pointed out as far back as July of last year that EA was in trouble, because their R&D costs were skyrocketing while their income was stagnant:
http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=4029
I assumed at the time that EA would move towards the Wii, to try and solve the problem. Well... EA talked a lot about increasing Wii support, but has done relatively little in that regard. Bodhesatva has an excellent post on the first page explaining that in more detail. When I saw that EA was devoting less than 5% of their efforts to DS games, that was pretty much the nail in the coffin.
You can't ignore the two best-selling platforms and expect to be profitable, not with such massive labor costs. (EA's got like 15 different development teams.) Not releasing Rockband 2 for Wii and PS2 until 2009 is among the dumbest publisher decisions in recent memory.
End of 2008 totals: Wii 42m, 360 24m, PS3 18.5m (made Jan. 4, 2008)
