14 DAY TRIAL // In the last few months of 2009, Electronic Arts was one of the publishers that felt a powerful blow to its financial situation and came up with a pretty cruel solution for this problem. The company fired around 1,500 of its employees and completely shut down Pandemic Studios, hoping that, this way, it would be able to cut its losses. And, according to the EA Q3 financial earnings report that it just released, while harsh, the method seems to have paid off for the company.
EA earned a lesser revenue than it did in the Q3 of 2008, but also lost less as well, as its push towards digital distribution showed a positive response from consumers. The EA net revenues rose to $1.34 billion, a 23-percent drop from last year, a drop that the company believes comes from fewer titles released and somewhat poor sales in Europe.
Of course, the fewer released titles don't mean that EA's developing studios were slacking off and not making any new ones, just that the publisher decided to push several of the ones still in progress into 2010, so the games should provide a substantial revenue boost for the company this time around. As for the company's net loss, the report shows that it lost $82 million, which would sound like a lot, if we didn't compare it to last year's $641 million loss.
As for EA's orientation towards digital distribution, the Q3 report showed that it generated an all-time quarter high of $152 million in revenues, a 30-percent increase over the last year. Playfish, which EA purchased for $300 million towards the end of 2009, was responsible for two of the top ten Facebook games in the quarter, but EA didn't give any exact numbers on these titles.
In the press release, EA's CEO, John Riccitiello, said that, "EA is growing share in our packaged goods business and our digital businesses continue to grow rapidly," adding that, "Mass Effect 2 is the first blockbuster of 2010 and we are looking forward to the launch of Dante's Inferno and Battlefield Bad Company 2." And, as we've already seen that Mass Effect 2 proved to be an amazing game, from the first look we got at Battlefield Bad Company 2 through the closed PC Beta, DICE's first-person shooter is going to be another one of 2010's greatest games.