One of EA's biggest enemies was marketing costs. There were nearly endless commercials for Mirror's Edge, Dead Space, Rock Band 2, Skate 2, and Madden NFL 09. All of these games were moderately successful (Madden 09 being a big success and Skate 2 still having far more time to sell), but it doesn't matter when advertising swallow the measly profits they make. You're not going to be the leading third party unless you focus development on the leading platforms. Would EA have been as much of a monster for the past decade if they had developed on the N64 and the Saturn while mostly ignoring the Playstation, or making games for the Xbox and Gamecube and only throwing the occasional bone to the Playstation 2? Admittedly, the HD consoles have demographics more suited to EA's biggest hits (shooters, sports games). But EA's success has always been built on cheap casual games. Focusing on higher budget HD games is going to continue to hurt them. This is why we see publishers like D3 who make games that nobody has ever heard of but still ends up with millions in profit while the biggest third party developer loses hundreds of millions of dollars. Obviously there was something else going on at EA to make the company lose money (I SERIOUSLY doubt that they lost 600 million just from a couple games selling below expectations).
