Electronic Arts reports $391 million loss, plans to cut 1,500 jobs

[NJ5]

According to their conference call, they cancelled a third of the upcoming games:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/172343-electronic-arts-f2q10-qtr-end-9-30-09-earnings-call-transcript?page=-1

Sean MacGowan - Needham & Company

Thank you. I was wondering if you could be a little bit more specific about where, what areas we would see the reduction in titles -- are you pushing that genre wise or particular types of games?

John S. Riccitiello

We sort of thought about how we would answer that question on the call and we were going to tell you about the just over a dozen unannounced titles we were cutting but that seemed to be challenging in the way of communication because we haven’t previously communicated to you which they were.

I think the better way to look at it would be that Electronic Arts has a core slate of games label and sports franchises that we will iterate on a either annual or bi-annual basis. And I think you know what those major titles are -- all of them are selling or have sold in their most recent edition 2 million units or more. After that, we’ve got The Sims and Hasbro, and frankly anything that doesn’t measure up to looking like it can pencil out to be in very high profit contributor and high unit seller got cut from our title slate from this point going forward.

So it is really, in a way, if you could array our title slate up knowing what we did about what we would have otherwise brought to market, we cut the bottom third of it.