Recent financial result by major third parties

[celine]

Griffin said:
Does anyone know how EA lost so much money, their games are far better then the competition in almost all areas.

 

“We’ve become a niche,” Riccitiello [ EA Ceo ] told the Times. “Eighty, 90 percent of the resources that are put into play by us and most of our competition are in building sequels of games that super-serve teenage boys with fast thumbs.”

EA's revenues have been completely stagnant for the past four years ( about US$ 3 billion ); they've essentially seen zero revenue growth while their costs (especially R&D) have steadily been rising. Meanwhile, the company continues to churn out sequel after sequel, appealing to the same core demographic of fans.

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Plus EA miss the DS train, heavily supporting PSP in early years ( and Wii is a quite similar story ). 

Simply, EA has seen a decline of his sport software due to PS2 ( physiological ) software decline when development cost is arising thanks to PS3 and Xbox 360. Revenue is stagnating but cost of R&D ( for example ) is arising.

The problem of EA is that they didn't have a top development team for awesome new franchise ( in an era of disruption ), they had only team that develop hystoric EA series ( like Madden and need for Speed ) every year.

So recently EA has spent an overall amount of US$ 860 million to buy Bioware/Pandemic.

I want to ask you all this :

Isn't this sums of money (  US$ 860 million ) an exageration ?

I mean when MS bought Rare they spent "only" US$ 377 million and EA best profit in a year was of US$ 577 million ( from April 2003 to march 2004 ).

In how many years Bioware/Pandemic can produce an amount of profit of US$ 800 million ?

What do you think about it ?