Oh, one more thing:

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).

Those guys are fruitcakes. They don't have any credibility in their articles.

I believe it's retail-only.

Maybe I was mistaken about EA, am I reading this wrong? I know the title of the second link is that EA reports a loss but it's best to read the whole article as it's not as clear as it seems

http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ERTS/0x0x205810/f546cf87-de0e-4b76-ad81-9e2587e75ee5/Earnings%20Release.pdf

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6190865.html

If I am mistaken than I apologize. But I was under the impression that EA losing money was a recent thing.

No way. Page 27:

http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ERTS/769255472x0x302630/A08800FF-9CE4-4C94-B93B-E43D90B2D195/ElectronicArts061209.pdf

Restructuring charges vs total loss:

2009 - $80 million (total loss $827 million)

2008 - $103 million (total loss $487 million)

2007 - $15 million (profit of $39 million, much lower than 2006's profit)

The restructuring charges are significant, but not the main reason for the losses in any way.

Wasn't Patcher on the original "Wii is a fad and will die in sales" from the get go now he's all like "none of us predicted its sales would decline!" seems to me he's just about making predictions that will get him views.

Why does no one ever cite the increase in PSN/Live downloads? I'm fairly certain these numbers are derived from retailers and they do not track purchases downloaded from the networks. Music genre disc sales may be down but do they ever think that on a per unit basis they are bringing in more revenue because of increased downloads? The same can also be said for other game titles. Maybe instead of buying 6 games a year a consumer is buying 5 and purchasing DLC for those five games. It is becoming more common place for games to have DLC and some games have DLC that can add up to almost the same amount as the whole game cost.

NPD doesn't track digital sales.

This could explain *some* of the declines, but not all of them. It'd be nice to have a total picture, but we do not yet. Mobile phone gaming was phenominal this year, and we saw the rise of social gaming which is worth a pretty penny.

Unfortunately, these markets are still take up a fraction of the losses. Worldwide, mobile phone gaming may be worth $5-6 billion this year. Social gaming may be worth $2 billion, and digital downloaded PC gaming may be worth another $2b. We'll just have to see how things stack up.

What's truly sad is that these big 3rd parties wouldn't be in such trouble if they had only embraced the Wii and the change it's bringing. Instead, it seems like they would rather risk death than to ever strongly support the system.