I've always figured EA's losses are due to their cutting down the workstaff, thats alot of redundancy packages. In turn the redundancies must be due to poor performance of sales, its a vicious cycle :P, it's very hard to make sense of though while every report has a large number of payoffs in the losses column.
Personally though I just see the industry has changed, and companies are still adjusting. Last gen a strong xmas line up was 5-6 decent games which would spread sales equally but not push past 1-2 million, now for whatever reason gamers purchasing habbits have become centre to 3-4 'big hitters' at xmas and companies need to produce 1 or 2 big hitters instead of try make 5-6 decent games.
The above trend imo can be applied to the whole year, but is more evident at xmas. I've seen EA and THQ reps talk about it on the net before, companies simply can't produce the quantity of games they did for the PS2 and they were stung by it so far this year.A few companies imo had foresight on this - Capcom in particular changed their developement habits to suit this trend and are very rarely posting poor quarterly reports.
The industry has nothing to worry about though in general, we're sort of in a transition period for how revenue is generated. Downloadable distribution streams are only starting to reach the mainstream, and in-game advertising (Which will be a huge source of revenue) is a few years off yet.
Is this revenue figure for retail revenue - or gaming revenue altogether (subscirptions, DLC, advertising etc).
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