Sega talks about their actual state. Core games at risk

[NJ5]

Even having only partial effective data ("to date"), it makes sense to project it over the missing days ( example: use last years data for the missing part, rescaled by the average YoY effective ratio ).

That's not how financial reports work. Go to finance.google.com and search for some companies, they have pretty up-to-date data on most American companies. The only projections are the ones which appear in financial forecasts (which have to be clearly marked as so), which are not what the linked data is showing.

Not all movies producer can afford big-budget movies. And you know what? They don't try to create blockbusters right away. They start with smaller movies, not so big stars, relatively unknown directors. Then the quality ones emerge and arrive at blockbuster budget level, where they are financially covered by big production companies who can afford the flops, but don't finance with $150M every kooky idea shown to them. That's what EA should do: help quality emerge.

I agree with the general idea. That's why I think that graphics have to be less ambitious, since they're the biggest reason for the big budgets we see nowadays. Unfortunately for publishers it's pretty hard to do that on the PS3 and 360, since the "core" PS360 gamers now expect high graphical quality out of any HD title. The only resort on those consoles is downloadable titles which have lower standards, but those don't generate anywhere near the amount of revenue that retail games do. I admit I haven't looked closely at sales/profitabiilty of downloadable titles, but even with publishers investing in these they're still losing money.

That's the way of the world. It's the way movies went, and I still don't see why we should go out of our way to support mediocrity.

I don't support mediocrity either. However I do support whatever it takes to make the industry sustainable, and the "graphical arms race" is clearly not a sustainable path. It just heightens gamers' expectations to a level that makes most or all publishers spend too high amounts of money in a significant percentage of their titles, which leads to the financial disasters we're seeing today.