I think part of the problem is that the industry is in a state of transition from one console generation to the next. It'll take at least another year or two until there are enough people who own 360s and PS3s for EA Sports to see significant growth.

I agree NBA live sucks balls, i used to love it but now it sucks. the last really good one was probably '05 or '06

I could be wrong but I think a large portion of the problem is how EA (and Take Two) have handled their sports franchises in the current generation. Like most publishers they focused their efforts towards the XBox 360 and PS3, and (essentially) ignored the Wii. The end result has been that these companies have produce a sports gamer's dream  on the two platforms which are not selling particularly well (so games see good but not great sales on these platforms), and have produced a sports gamer's nightmare on the system that has been selling really well (making for pretty bad but not awful sales).

Until the sports crowd (as a whole) can afford a PS3 or XBox 360, or the companies start producing every sports game at a decent level of quality for the Wii, the sales of sports games will not grow dramatically.

 Yeah, from a business point of view getting a few non exclusive games to the 360 is worth losing billions over. Sorry for getting it wrong, I apologize. I'll go buy my new stockportfolio of whatever company is losing money now.

I think that sports titles in general just sell less because the genre is mature and there are not compelling new features from year to year.

As for the Wii, well why would you focus resources on a platform that is graphically and processing inferior. They probably list the features they want to build then decide whether or not it is feasible to do them 100% on the Wii. Instead they should spend more time making the motion controls better on the Wii and I think they have done that with Tiger Woods.

I think that EA rode the wave of casuals that the PS2 brought into the market for years. As has been said, it might be reaching it's limit now, at least as far as huge growths in sales go.

Then you can also look at Madden 08. I haven't played the PS3 or 360 versions, but it's been well documented all of the problems they had with those two versions. I own Madden 08 on Wii, and though it plays very well, the game is riddled with bugs. I made a thread about it a while back, mentioning the various game freezes(which cost me hours and hours of having to replay games) and the broken online mode. Some people simply cannot connect to other people. Me and my brother tried for over 30 minutes on two consecutive nights to connect to each other...on a night that only had a couple dozen people on the server. We tried without being on each other's buddy list, with being on each other's, quickplay connection, passworded rooms, and everything you can think of.

I registered at EA's site and sent a mail to customers service wanting to know if a patch or a disc replacement was coming(and told them beforehand not to tell me to check for smudges or scratches on my disc). Their response was that it could be a problem with my Wii, and if that wasn't it I needed to go post on the forums where the devs could answer my questions(as that was not their field obviously). One look at their forum made it obvious that the problem is just being ignored. Nothing to fix the various freezing issues, and the response about online problems said it had something to do with cordless phones. Quite a few posters had replied saying that they had no problems playing Mario Strikers online, so they didn't see how a cordless phone could be causing problems with Madden online.

The point? EA has been selling millions and millions of games every year, for many years. If this is how they treat these customers who have real issues with the software, it only seems natural that it will eat into their sales over a period of time. I honestly think that bad word-of-mouth has effected Madden 08's sales this year on the 360, PS3, and Wii. Maybe not as much as simply reaching a saturation point and hardware transitions, but it's a part of the puzzle in my book.

too repetitive each year = boring = bad sales

Yearly sequels does not make for endless growth.

Rock Band and Spore will be huge for them in 2008. But I'm sure they're spending the bulk of their money on all these declining yearly franchises... Sports, NFS, MOH, Sims...