EA wins "Worst Company in America 2012", reacts butthurt

[catfood]

I think it's safe to say that all the blame for TOR's failure goes to dose dam PC gamers and their pirating ways, little rascals.

 

[Dexter]

Great article on GamesIndustry.biz analyzing all the fail and stink of EA: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-06-21-stock-ticker-why-eas-market-valuation-has-crashed (it dropped below $12 btw. )

EA's market valuation is down 50 per cent since November. What's gone wrong?

Two stock market stories have captured the attention of the games industry in recent months - the weak post-IPO performance of Zynga, and the dramatic bellyflop of THQ, whose shares have lost 80 per cent of their value over the past 12 months. Against that backdrop, few people seem to have noticed what's happening to Electronic Arts' valuation - yet a quick glance at EA's performance reveals a worrying situation and suggests a tough time ahead for the company which used to be the industry's biggest third-party publisher.

Electronic Arts' stock has lost almost 40 per cent of its value since the start of this calendar year - and in fact, since the middle of last holiday season (around November 2011) the company's stock has been in a steady decline which has now wiped close to 50 per cent off EA's valuation. It's not a decline as sharp as THQ's, but it represents a much larger loss of value - THQ's market capitalisation is only around $50 million, whereas even after this enormous loss of value, EA is still capitalised at around $4 billion.

To visualise EA's share price decline, let's look first at a simple graph of its performance over the past 12 months.

The decline I'm talking about is clearly visible - starting last November and carrying on almost uninterrupted right up to this week. From top to bottom, that slope covers 50 per cent of EA's valuation, from a high of just over $25 in November down to a low of $12.29, recorded just last week. While it's not unusual for small companies' share prices to fluctuate this strongly during times of trouble, EA is not a small company. This fluctuation represents billions of dollars moving out of the company's valuation, and the fact that it's a trend which has persisted for six months suggests that investors are genuinely concerned about EA, rather than simply being spooked by rumours or speculation in the short-term.

To get a clearer picture of where EA stands and what the problem might be, it's important to isolate the company's performance from wider economic factors. The most straightforward way to do this is to graph the firm's share price against the performance of the NASDAQ, the New York based stock exchange which lists most of America's high-tech companies. This next graph shows the NASDAQ's overall performance in red, alongside EA's stock in blue.

This graph is useful, because it pinpoints the start of the problem - and also reveals that EA's performance is even weaker than it seems at first glance. As you can see, EA's share price pretty much tracked the performance of the NASDAQ up until the end of last November - meaning that market sentiment around the firm was basically neutral, with investors considering it no stronger or weaker than its peers on the stock market. Then, while the NASDAQ itself saw fairly solid gains in the first half of 2012, EA went into free-fall. To the 50 per cent loss of value in the stock itself, we now have to tack on around 10 per cent of additional losses - since EA's stock should reasonably be expected to be 10 per cent higher, if it had only managed to perform on the same level as its peers in the NASDAQ.

Something has gone terribly wrong for EA, at least in the eyes of stock market investors. There are several plausible explanations for this - each of which is likely to be true to a certain degree, since it's unlikely that any one factor alone is responsible for driving the price down so far.

Firstly, there's Star Wars: The Old Republic. EA's stock price went into decline after The Old Republic's launch, and hasn't recovered yet - and that timing is unlikely to be a coincidence. Expectations among investors for SWTOR were extremely high, given the game's much-publicised high development costs (which probably make it the most expensive game project ever), the strength of the Star Wars license, the track record of developer Bioware and, crucially, the tantalising possibility of building an ongoing MMO revenue stream for EA which would match the one enjoyed by rival Activision Blizzard from World of Warcraft. While it would be unfair to characterise SWTOR as a complete failure, it has certainly not been a success on the level which EA or its investors would have wanted. The game has lost 400,000 subscribers since February, and it seems inevitable that the company will be forced into an embarrassing (but probably commercially sensible) transition to a free-to-play model sooner rather than later.

For many investors, the disappointing performance of SWTOR is almost certainly seen as the "final straw" in terms of the second factor in this decline - John Riccitiello's leadership of EA. Riccitiello has been CEO since 2007, and arrived to the job promising to turn the company around - outlining a transformation plan which would see EA focusing on quality, controlling costs, embracing digital business models and improving the company's tarnished reputation. In some respects, his successes are undeniable. EA's digital business is booming compared to most of its commercial rivals, and while the company still attracts brickbats from vocal fans on the internet on a regular basis, titles like Mass Effect, Dead Space and Battlefield have also earned it a reputation for creating high-quality "core" titles.

In other respects, however, Riccitiello's transformation of EA is clearly struggling - not least in terms of timescales. When he arrived in 2007, it was anticipated that the process he wanted to bring the company through would take three years. In mid-2012, there's still no end in sight. It's unsurprising that the stock market would be extremely wary of a business which, to quote another industry watcher, is presently in year five of a three-year transformation project that's actually going to take seven years. SWTOR was almost certainly being used by many investors as a test of Riccitiello's strategy. It's a hugely expensive title, created by a studio with a reputation for quality (which Riccitiello himself added to the EA group as one of his first actions on becoming CEO), and focused strongly on digital business objectives, not least of which was being the flagship title for Origin, EA's Steam competitor. For SWTOR to fail makes Riccitiello's entire strategy look dodgy to investors who were already deeply concerned by the slow pace of progress.

Not convinced that investors have lost faith? Look how quick they were to spread the frankly barmy rumour that Japanese-Korean free-to-play gaming firm Nexon was going to buy EA - an incredibly unlikely proposition from the outset, yet one which was widely reported and discussed both within the games business and within the investment community. That tells you something important; firstly, it illustrates how far EA has fallen within the market (despite having a healthy slate of titles and pretty solid financials), and secondly, it tells you that investors are very, very keen for something like that to happen. They'd like to see some kind of exit for EA, which means that they're not confident in the firm's future.

Although the overriding factors in EA's valuation collapse are internal, it's important to look at wider factors within the industry as well - because the reality is that this is not a situation that's confined to EA. Many games publishers face a tough transition, not merely to next-gen console hardware next year (which is tough enough in itself), but also to a world of new business models and new competitors. Several of them probably won't make it unscathed, and the stock market knows it. Here's a graph showing EA alongside its two main US competitors, Activision Blizzard and Take Two.

As you can see, EA is underperforming its rivals by a pretty significant margin - but look at Take Two's numbers by comparison. It starts declining later in the day than EA, only seriously dropping off in March of this year, but the decline itself is even steeper than EA's. Since March, Take Two has lost over 30 per cent of its value, which strongly suggests that many of the same concerns which are depressing investor confidence in Electronic Arts are also being applied to Take Two.
"The games industry's most bankable company in the USA right now is only just managing to keep up with its tech industry peers, while the other top two publishers are rapidly spiralling down the plughole"

The outlier here is Activision Blizzard, which is keeping its head - and its valuation - well above water. Since EA's fall from grace, Activision Blizzard is absolutely dominant in terms of market capitalisation - it's now worth over three times more than EA according to the stock market, which suggests a much higher degree of confidence in Activision than in any of its rivals.

That confidence is based on a few factors. First, there's Blizzard - a company which has demonstrated an unmatched ability to break away from the hit-driven structure of the games business and instead create games that keep paying for themselves years after launch. The steady revenue stream from World of Warcraft may be slowly dropping off, but it's still the single most valuable product in the games industry, generating strong revenues month after month and making Activision Blizzard vastly more bankable than any other company in this sector. Secondly, there's Call of Duty - a franchise which has reliably produced the biggest-selling games of the year, every year for the past half-decade. That goose won't keep on laying golden eggs forever - in fact, it's probably already in decline - but it's another factor which investors see as reliable and bankable, at least for now.

Even so, it's not all roses in the garden - even for Activision Blizzard. This final graph adds the NASDAQ composite to the picture, showing how the big three US publishers match up against their peers on the stock market.

In this graph, the problems facing EA and Take Two are even more starkly revealed, as both of them are veering sharply away from the red line (which you can think of as a kind of average of the performance of American tech companies). Activision Blizzard, meanwhile, is just about managing to hug the line - slightly underperforming it in the past few months, if anything.

In short, the games industry's most bankable company in the USA right now is only just managing to keep up with its tech industry peers, while the other top two publishers are rapidly spiralling down the plughole. The overall picture is not encouraging. Investors are clearly deeply worried about the games industry's biggest companies - they're cautious on Activision Blizzard, and downright negative on EA and Take Two. EA needs to focus on convincing the markets that Riccitiello's plan is going to work out, of course, but it's also clear that there's a wider challenge here for the entire games industry. The next transition, which has already started, is going to be the toughest one the industry has ever faced - the stock market knows it, and until the industry can show itself to be ready to cope with that transition, investors are going to steer well clear of videogame-related stocks.

Also, there's another FUD PR article trying to distract from all of that over at Kotaku, about how they're all about Free2Play and Casual Gamers and Gaming and how it's great that everyone being able to move a finger is a "gamer" now and that people need to be "patient" with them while they're gouging everyone with great new DLC and microtransaction practices, because "they're just exploring business models", the Internet being mean for calling them bad names, how it hurts the poor employees and all that
http://kotaku.com/5919847/the-stran...ng-future-of-video-games-according-to-a-giant

The Strange, Scary, Fascinating, Exciting Future of Video Games, According to A Giant

You are, presumably, a person who plays video games and probably not a rich executive. Maybe you own an Xbox 360 or play games on your iPhone or maybe both.

You have some favorite video games. And there are some series and some types of games that you hate. Maybe you keep up with gaming news on a site like Kotaku. You have an ordinary life, probably. A good one, hopefully. But you're not a wealthy Chief Operating Officer, and you might not be able to relate to all of the hopes and fears of the average COO.

When Peter Moore, COO of Electronic Arts talks, what he is saying could affect you. It's even sort of about you. It's about the games you might play in the future and the way you might play them. But it's also about how the things you might say make a COO feel. That part, you might be able to relate to. The part about where the COO thinks games are going? That's the part that might make your head spin.

EA, of course, makes Madden and Mass Effect and The Sims and Battlefield and Bejeweled and so much more. They're about as massive as it gets in gaming and what they want to do will affect a lot of gamers.

I'm about to dump a whole lot of Peter Moore on you, but I've got to set this up first. Moore is an amiable executive who, in a previous incarnation as a top marketing guy at Microsoft, would roll up his sleeves to reveal tattooed logos of whichever major game he was about to hype. He's frank enough in interviews to say that a key product his company is currently offering might need two more years of tinkering before it's excellent. He's relatable enough that this middle-aged, English executive can precede his latest interview with me, conducted a couple of weeks ago in Los Angeles at E3 with a discussion about West Coast rap. He's mortal enough that he admits a weakness for reading all the comments under articles about EA and internalizing the harshest criticism. This is a Rorschach blot of a sentence, but let's give it a shot: He genuinely seems to care.

He did not think it was cool at all that his company had been called "cynical bastards."​

I'd interviewed Moore many times before we spoke at E3 but was eager to again to follow-up on a rant of his that I had witnessed while visiting EA's Los Angeles campus in May. He'd ranted then, in front of reporters, about how day-one downloadable content, micro-transactions and other aspects of modern gaming were here to stay, how gamers needed to cut EA some slack and how he did not think it was cool at all that his company had been called "cynical bastards." (That last one was a reference to the creator of Minecraft, Markus "Notch" Persson, snarking on EA's promotion of an "indie game" bundle when the company started promoting a discount bundle of several indie-developed games that EA had partnered with and published. EA = indie? It's a $4 billion company, one of the industry's largest.)

***
"We're going through, as an industry, just an unbelievably difficult transformation, that is not from one business model to another but from one business model to a myriad of different business models," Moore said to me as we chatted in L.A.

Business models. Not the sexiest of topics. We were definitely in the realm of Things COOs Care About. But it does involve you, so bear with me.

"It is a very interesting period," he said. "And I"ll say interesting period in our industry's history when the conventional wisdom of 'We're going through a console transition and, when the new consoles come out, everything is going to be fine again', is no longer the case. Consoles are still going to be a very important part of what we do. But so are browsers. So are iOS devices. So are Android mobile phones. So are PCs, which are feeling a renaissance. It's all coming together in this potpourri..."

Moore: "I think, ultimately, those microtransactions will be in every game, but the game itself or the access to the game will be free."​

OK, stop again. A little more context is needed. The mood of my chat with Moore was the mood of much of E3. Many game creators and business people with whom I spoke seemed tired of this generation of gaming and said they felt gamers were ready to move on. Some, of course, are excited about selling games to the huge numbers of people who own Xbox 360s now rather than to the relatively tiny number of people who will own a next-gen Xbox in, say, the fall of 2013 when that machine is just getting started. But coming in from the sides, breaching the walls of the hardcore gamer's paradise that is E3 are the Zyngas and the Apples, the people making games for Facebook and iPad and Android. Companies like EA have been branching out to all of those fresh areas, just as they've been trying out new or imported business models—making their games free-to-play (you download the game for free and pay for gameplay-relevant upgrades and/or cosmetic items later); selling downloadable expansions even on the day a game launches, and so on.

Overall, there's a sense of confusion as to what is really going to take hold, whether one form of gaming—primarily the $60 console game—is going to be dominant in the future. Hell, you're about to hear from a COO who raises the question of even how relevant the $60 console game will be. In fact, let's get to that part now:

Kotaku: "How do you balance the effectiveness of any microtransaction-based game design or business model with the anxiety a gamer might feel that they're being nickel and dimed?"

Moore: "I think, ultimately, those microtransactions will be in every game, but the game itself or the access to the game will be free. Ultimately, my goal is... I measure our business in millions of people have bought our game. Maybe when I'm retired, as this industry progresses, hundreds of millions are playing the games. Zero bought it. Hundreds of millions are playing. We're getting 5 cents, 6 cents ARPU [average revenue per user] a day out of these people. The great majority will never pay us a penny which is perfectly fine with us, but they add to the eco-system and the people who do pay money—the whales as they are affectionately referred to—to use a Las Vegas term, love it because to be number one of a game that like 55 million people playing is a big deal."

Kotaku: "You're saying inevitably all games are going to be that model?"

Moore: "I think there's an inevitability that happens five years from now, 10 years from now, that, let's call it the client, to use the term, [is free.] It is no different than... it's free to me to walk into The Gap in my local shopping mall. They don't charge me to walk in there. I can walk into The Gap, enjoy the music, look at the jeans and what have you, but if I want to buy something I have to pay for it."

Kotaku: "I understand how that would work for Madden. I can't imagine how that would work for a Mass Effect. That's a storyline game."

Moore: "That's the point. If the business model... what do you do? It may well be that there will be games that survive and they are the $60 games, but I believe that the real growth is bringing billions of people into the industry and calling them gamers. Hardcore gamers won't like to hear this. They like to circle the wagons around what they believe is something they feel they have helped build—and rightly so. But we have seen, whether it was with the Wii getting mom off the couch to do Wii Sports or whether it was, more recently EA Sports Active, where we get females who love to work out, all the things that social gaming did—Rock Band did it, Guitar Hero did it—all of the things that elevated it from being a dark art of teenage boys usually sequestered in the bedroom—that it was testosterone-filled content that everybody railed against—to where everybody is a gamer...if you can move your index finger and swipe it this way, your'e a gamer. And that has got to be the way it goes."
***
You really could have called this E3 the anxiety E3, the E3 when people wondered and even worried about what was coming next. But why confine that to E3? The feeling's been rumbling for a while and there are people—younger gamers, I imagine—who might tell codgers like me who grew up playing Super Mario Bros. to get over it and embrace our free-to-play League of Legends era.

Anxiety?

Moore: "We can't end up being music."​

A big gaming chain went out of business in Europe. So, here's Moore, cheering for the big chain in the U.S.: "We all love going to GameStop and chatting with the guys. You want these guys to stay in business. You've got to provide them with opportunities to play in digital, otherwise they become Blockbuster. Otherwise they become Tower Records. "

Under threat?

Moore: "We can't end up being music." (I'll get back to that one.)

***
Peter Moore, the polished COO, gives the impression of a man who is bushwacking, hacking at the reeds and swatting at the gnats, squinting at the sun while trying to find a clearing. And the last thing he yearns for now—though he likes constructive criticism—is what he thinks are unfair potshots.

Moore: "You've got this potpourri of things coming together in this fabulous kind of soup that we need to figure out as an industry... I just ask for patience. You know me pretty well. I read all of this stuff…. I think at times gamers need to understand that we need to work our way through this stuff. They need to be patient with us as we try to figure out what are the business models of the future. I am the chief operating officer of a company that has offices in 70 countries and is responsible for the employment of over 9000 very creative, hard-working talented people. And when you see the things—look, I know it's the Internet, I know it's anonymous…

Kotaku: "It's not all anonymous. Somebody with a name called you 'cynical bastards.' You referenced that [in an earlier speech]."

Moore: "I did. I took umbrage to that in front of you. I just read that story and, what we're referring to—I'm almost doing the interview for you—is the fact that we decided to help some indie developers and bundle some stuff up…"

Kotaku: "Right, those were partner games, right?"

Moore: "Yeah, these were Partner games. EA Partner games… before I even came to EA, I was in awe of what EA had done in terms of EA distribution and EA Partners, to get out there and help provide a platform of distribution for developers that just couldn't' put their stuff out on the market. We were the guys that would do that. I don't know of anybody else in this industry that's got the record that Electronic Arts have, way before I got here, welcoming stuff. Look, we do it to make money. No bones about it. But we do it so that we can share money and put games out in the market. And you can name a hundred of them that you know EA has published as an EAP or, previously, EAD operation. Probably the biggest one was Rock Band, which was an EAP title which we helped market. We worked with MTV and really helped that little bit of a social change to what gaming was all about. Yes I know Guitar Hero was there, but Rock Band became a bigger… that was an EAP title. So, the 'cynical bastard' thing, and, of course, because of who it was and it got so much coverage that I just thought: 'This is not right for the employees who have worked hard to put this together. My team at EAP had worked with these developers and said, 'let's just bundle this together and offer up a deal.'"

Kotaku: "Did you call Notch?"

Moore: "No. "

An EA spokesperson sitting nearby chimed in, pointing out that shortly after the "cynical bastards" incident, EA announced that EA would waive distribution fees for 90 days for any Kickstarter-funded games sold through its new PC service, Origin. A counter-measure to Origin's mighty competitor Steam? Probably. A boost for indies? Probably that, too.
***
It's weird to hear a COO to ask his customers for patience as his company dabbles with different business models. Moore will vigorously defend charging $10 extra for Mass Effect 3's day-one DLC, maintaining that the $60 base game was chock-full, but his answer as to why EA didn't charge for the day-one DLC for Mass Effect 2 is a meek: "We make individual decisions about individual games and individual business decisions with partners who are involved."

He certainly respects the enthusiasm of gamers. "There's no more passionate a fan of a medium than a gamer," he said. "People love movies. People like music. People love TV shows. Nobody loves their medium like gamers love their medium. I've always known that the tallest trees catch the most wind. That's a fact of life."

And he doesn't think his company should be spared harsh words. "None of us expect to be nor do we deserve to be immune to criticism."

Moore: "There's no more passionate a fan of a medium than a gamer."​

But the patience he's begging for sounds like it could be, well, expensive or even just confusing, for gamers who wait for EA to figure out the best way to charge for its stuff.

"I want people to understand that what EA employees and the people who create the games are working hard to do is pick our way through this transformation as best we can," he said. "We're a publicly-traded company. We have an obligation to, quite frankly, make money so we can re-invest money in making great games again. The games you saw yesterday [at EA's E3 press-conference, games such as Dead Space 3 and Crysis 3] are, if you will, pre-paid by us from a development perspective. And it's only a year or a year and half down the road that we start to see that [money come back as people pay for the game]. That's why, to continue to do what we do and build the brands and build the business models, again, I'll ask for patience—the same way you covered me when I said we need 18 months for Origin and I still stand by that.

"We're just picking our way through and nobody is any way trying to gouge anybody. [Moore slaps hand on the table.] We're picking through this at the same time that gamers are trying to figure out what he or she likes about games in the future. and how much they want to spend and what platform they want to do it on and what other genres there are of the future. We're doing our best, alongside everybody else. "
***
Let's get back to the music thing. The upheaval of the music industry several years ago is surely what freaks out movie people and book people and, it seems, games people as well. Piracy, downloading and the Apple juggernaut changed everything. Who buys CDs any more? Who waits for albums?

Music is the spectre. So let's end on this last exchange:

Moore: "We've got to listen better as an industry, but at at the same time we've got to pick our way through these things. Stephen, we can't end up being music. Music used to make money selling music. They don't make money selling music anymore. Apple makes money selling music. God bless them, because they sorted out the problem that was BitTorrents and LimeWire, Kazaa..."

Kotaku: "My kitchen table is LimeWire's kitchen table, because they went out of business and my wife and I needed a new table."

Moore: "We've got to listen better as an industry, but at at the same time we've got to pick our way through these things."​

Moore: "I remember going to a lot of going-out-of-business sales in 1999, south of Market, but this ability for us to learn from the lessons of music... Maybe we don't sell our games up front and it's all about [making money later]. Maybe it is like music. Music is now all about going on tour and concerts, go do corporate appearances, sell your merchandise, build your online website, find ways to do it that way, because they don't make much money after Apple takes its cut, and that's where most of us get our music.

"We're going to go through a similar trial and tribulation in the video game industry in which it's no longer about… we don't even see ourselves as a traditional publisher anymore. We're a digital entertainment company. And within that comes different ways we have to drive our revenue, keep our investors happy and make sure that w'ere providing compensation to our employees in the form of the stock price that they're happy with that is part of their equity package. And all of this is part of being a publicly-traded company."

Kotaku: "The glass-half-empty reporter would mention that you didn't just mention as one of your priorities: Make great video games."

Moore: "That's a given for EA. That's what we do."

 

[Icewater]

Kotaku: "The glass-half-empty reporter would mention that you didn't just mention as one of your priorities: Make great video games."

Moore: "That's a given for EA. That's what we do."

 

[Destroid]

You are, presumably, a person who plays video games and probably not a rich executive. Maybe you own an Xbox 360 or play games on your iPhone or maybe both.

 

[Menckenstein]

EA nosediving out of control like an F22 pilot

 

[Cassidy]

You are, presumably, a person who plays video games and probably not a rich executive. Maybe you own an Xbox 360 or play games on your iPhone or maybe both.

Why get mad on that? Finally an article has the guts to subtly admit modern gaming on consoles and hipster mobile shit caters to sheeple so retarded that other than lottery none of them will ever get rich.

 

[Micmu]

...The overall picture is not encouraging...

Not for EA, no. But seeing EA and the rest of big-publisher-scum slowly die is VERY encouraging for the games industry. No more stomping developers and more chances for the "little" guys and no shit business models.

 

[Angthoron]

http://www.cinemablend.com/games/pa...lo-fears-his-job-due-stock-failure-44468.html

Michael Pachter, Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst, has let loose a tidbit of information that should make some gamers smile at least a little bit: Pachter claims that EA's current CEO, John Riccitiello, confided in him that he fears for his job due to EA's piss poor stock. Good riddance.

According to Develop, the Pach-Man stated that...

"I had lunch with John Riccitiello last week. He was asking me why no one wants to buy his stock," ... "He doesn’t understand what’s going wrong."..."we’re in fifth year of the three-year turnaround".​

Regarding that last tidbit, Pachter is referring to the reason EA's stock isn't lifting off. The elongated console cycle has created a rift where Pachter believes big publishers are stuck in a rut and suffering from sequalitis. I call that bull crap.

According to Pachter, Riccitiello honestly doesn't know why EA's stock price is dipping and his response to Pachter was that..."Yeah, but, in 2008, when we said it’ll be a three-year turnaround, I thought new consoles were coming out in 2010-2011". Pachter believes that sequelitis is what hurt games like Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero and that it's affecting EA's bottom line.

All right, enough talking about this like Pachter or Riccitiello have a clue about the gaming industry. Let's cover some facts first.

Fact: You don't need new consoles to make good games. The elongated console cycle wouldn't be so bad if big publishers made good games instead of trying to rely on rehashes, sequels and blockbuster wannabes. A good game is not determined by the amount of polygons a character model has or the amount of ambient light that shines through a virtual glass pane window.

Fact: Indie studios are churning out games that are making a killing while utilizing today's generation of hardware. Games like Fez, Braid, Limbo, MineCraft, Terraria, Team Fortress, DayZ, Portal, Q.U.B.E. and Amnesia: Dark Descent have all done well with little or no marketing. You don't need new consoles to make new, fun or innovative games. It all depends on how you use what you have.

Fact: A lot of the sequels that are bombing or underperforming on the market are retreads of games we've already played, including but not limited to Halo, Call of Duty, Gears of War, Need for Speed and Uncharted. "Me-too" rip-offs are exactly that, and the longer top publishers keep trying to milk the same ideas over and over again the more gamers will become less interested in the product. Unfortunately we've seen studios such as Black Rock, Codemaster's Red River studio, Radical Entertainment and other studios fold under similar circumstances.

This is not to mention things like Online Passes, the over-abundance of DLC and other shaky shenanigans of the sort, contribute to a lack of consumer confidence.

EA could easily redeem themselves by focusing on smaller but more innovative games; projects like the original Dead Space and Mirror's Edge marked a positive path for the company. Their partnership program for pushing out indie titles like Shank and Warp could prove to move the company into a better light with both consumers and investors.

However, running their reputation into the ground with over-bloated and obtuse marketing schemes while also trying to talk up their upcoming games as if they're the greatest thing ever (even though many are just retreads) it does nothing to boost consumer confidence, especially in the core community.

Now I'm not saying that repairing EA's stock is a walk in the park. Any publicly traded company is going to have a hard time in a creatively-motivated industry such as the gaming industry, but if John Riccitiello honestly doesn't see what could cause the stock to drop then maybe it is time for him to be replaced. Perhaps a re-branding of Electronic Arts wouldn't be such a bad thing and in the end we could potentially see EA get back to basics: making good games and selling quality products. Ahahaha...nah.

Cinemablend seems to not like the modern industry for some reason?

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

A parasite trying to take as much from his host as he can, wonders why the host is dying.

 

[Angthoron]

I gotta say that there's also some amusing irony there, guy talks to expert, expert blurts out info to public, EA stock plummets further.

 

[Menckenstein]

The Great Video Game Crash of 2013 coming soon to wikipedia

 

[Dexter]

http://www.vgrevolution.com/2012/07/ea-settles-exclusive-sports-license-lawsuit/

$27 Million Settlement Announced in EA Madden Price-fixing Lawsuit

SAN FRANCISCO – Attorneys representing purchasers of Electronic Arts, Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) (“EA”) football video games have reached a proposed settlement over claims that the gaming giant violated antitrust and consumer protection laws and overcharged consumers for the games.

The case, originally filed June 5, 2008, in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that EA violated antitrust and consumer protection laws by establishing exclusive license agreements with the National Football League (NFL), National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), and the Arena Football League (AFL). The agreements gave EA the exclusive right to produce football video games with the teams, players and other assets of the NFL, AFL and NCAA, the lawsuit states.

The proposed settlement, filed with the court on July 19, 2012, would establish a $27 million fund for consumers who purchased Madden NFL, NCAA Football or AFL games published by EA. If the settlement is approved by the court, consumers who purchased a sixth generation title (GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox) may receive up to $6.79 per game. Those who purchased a seventh generation title (Wii, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3) may be entitled to as much as $1.95 per game under the terms of the proposed settlement.

It also stipulates that EA will not sign an exclusive license arrangement with the AFL for five years and will not renew its current agreement with the NCAA, which expires in 2014, for at least five years.

“After more than four years of hard-fought litigation, we have reached a settlement that we strongly believe is fair to consumers,” said attorney Steve Berman, managing partner of Hagens Berman, the law firm representing consumers. “We look forward to moving this process forward and asking the court to approve this settlement, which we think is in the best interests of the class.”

On April 6, 2011, the court certified a class of consumers in the case, including all persons who purchased Madden NFL, NCAA Football or AFL games published by EA between January 1, 2005, and the present.

The proposed settlement must be approved by the court before it is final.

For some retarded reason they managed to save their stock back to $12 after nearly going below $11: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-07-19/electronic-arts-rises-after-ceo-says-growth-is-ahead

But it's on its way back down again, there is probably a lot more lulz to be had in 3 days time when they have to yet again release their quarterly numbers: http://www.4-traders.com/ELECTRONIC...2012-Annual-Meeting-of-Stockholders-14422684/
SWTOR isn't exactly expected to look very rosy...

In knowing preparation they even gave everyone a free week and made the game "Free to Play" up to Lvl15:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/07/11/swtor-wants-you-back-yes-you-steve/
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/07/12/lite-saber-more-free-swtor-this-time-for-all/

 

[SCO]

brofists all around, thread is great

 

[Oesophagus]

Too good to be true. I'll believe it when I can dance on EA's grave

 

[Black]

http://blogs.bettor.com/Anonymous-Bioware-Insider-blames-fans-for-SWTOR-Video-Games-Update-a173317

EA blames us and to some extent they’re right to. But it was fan feedback from the day we opened the forums that encouraged us to design it for the fans the way it is and that included making it more like Kotor then an MMO like Wow

http://www.cnbc.com/id/48212955

Electronic Arts stock is trading around a 52-week low, but Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello tells me that the fundamental problem is not with the company, but with investors understanding its business.

 

[Infinitron]

http://blogs.bettor.com/Anonymous-Bioware-Insider-blames-fans-for-SWTOR-Video-Games-Update-a173317

EA blames us and to some extent they’re right to. But it was fan feedback from the day we opened the forums that encouraged us to design it for the fans the way it is and that included making it more like Kotor then an MMO like Wow

 

[Ulminati]

Yes. I wanted something more like KOTOR and less like WOW. I wanted a single player game. And that's pretty much what I got. And you know what happens once I complete a single player RPG? I stop playing it. I don't hang around to pay monthly subscription.

Adios, TOR. your Imperial Agent story was great, your Bounty Hunter and Trooper storylines pretty decent. Sith warrior... Less so. Huttball was still lulzy when I left, but not lulzy enough to pay a monthly subscription.

If you'd dropped the multiplayer entirely and released the imperial agent and jedi knight stories as a better polished single player game for 1/5th the development cost, it would've been a commercial success. Or at the very least recuperated development costs.

Think about how cool that could've been Bioware. The same overarching storyline, 2 sideplots running in parallel, one republic and one empire. Let players control 3-4 characters and weave puzzle-bosses like those in your flashpoints in here and there. Have their paths cross a few times and save the player's build when they get to the intersections. On subsequent playthroughs, the player runs into their own old PC as an antagonist. Think about it.

 

[Oesophagus]

On subsequent playthroughs, the player runs into their own old PC as a romanceable companion.

fixed

 

[Ulminati]

Eh, the romancable companion crappu was easily skippable. But you should totally BROmance Kaliyo 'cause she was pretty BRO for a Bio-ho. But again, if they had boiled the 8 storylines down to 2 and let the most competent writers they had (I'm looking at you, IA and BH) write them while reusing the planets, items and enemies like they did in TOR you could've ended up with 2 actually-pretty-decent stories with more fleshed-out NPCs and branching dialogue/quest oppertunities. And it the game wasn't designed around making people pay monthly subscriptions, they could've reduced the grinding and kept the pace going pretty well. I know it's nnever going ot happen 'cause Bioware and all. I'm just saying they actually had all of the ingredients at hand to a pretty compelling single player RPG if all the people in charge had been burned at the stake and replaced with the writers, programmers etc that worked under them.

And it's seriously a concept someone ought to explore in a game at some point. Tell the same story from the viewpoint of two opposing factions. Have the players missions run in parallel with the events in the main plot arc, spanning the same locations in roughly the same order. Save "graveyard files" of the PCs similar to how Nethack-likes save you when you die to return asa ghost. Then on subsequent playthroughs, have the players own dude show up as antagonist. I'm pretty sure people would have a blast. Or get really infuriated with the encounter if they made some sort of cheese build first time through.

 

[Angthoron]

Electronic Arts stock is trading around a 52-week low, but Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello tells me that the fundamental problem is not with the company, but with investors understanding its business.

Fucking entitled investors.

 

[Ulminati]

Electronic Arts stock is trading around a 52-week low, but Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello tells me that the fundamental problem is not with the company, but with investors understanding its business.

Fucking entitled investors.

So EA blames the investors, Bioware blames the fans.


I guess you could say that neither party feels....


...Emotionally invested

 

[Peter]

 

[Dexter]

Well, that shit is old since they fell below $11 today, sharp drop right along with Zynga to like $10.80 since they put a lot of eggs in that basket and it's about to pop: http://www.google.com/finance?cid=168725
http://estocksdaily.com/zynga-nasda...sales-and-profit-estimates-znga-ea-thqi-gluu/

I predict they may even fall below $10 come July 31 after they've posted their earnings and the new SWTOR numbers: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/07/26/electronic-arts-in-the-spotlight-soon/

 

[Peter]

Their shareholder meeting is starting now btw. Should be p lulzy.

http://investor.ea.com/eventdetail.cfm?eventid=116779

Just sign up with a fake everything. No e-mail verification or anything.

edit: it's literally starting right now

 

[Black]

I find it amusing that Codex went down just before start of the meeting, almost as Codex administration didn't want us to find out.