Always amused me when people outside industry comments on this.
First there is no competition from Ubisoft, they have a different consumer target.They release 2 major titles per year compared with the other 2 companies that have much more IP's.
Second, Activion is now Blizzard+ GTA, which might be a disaster for it's long term strategy
And third Ubisoft is long behind these 2 giants their revenues never passed 1 billion dollars compared with 4-5 billions from EA and Actiblizz.

Questionable points of view if you dig into the issues...

First of all, the new IP EA has made has been of high quality...the biggest reason why they haven't sold more is the bad economy and risk aversion (ie. on a limited budget people will buy what is tried and tested). And on the topic of the economy, the majority of finance professionals got that wrong too, so you can't single out EA for that.

Secondly on "missing the console cycle"--that's a direct reference to EA's market share on the Wii. It's lacking and EA didn't have strong conviction for that platform in the beginning. That being said, looking at the history of Nintendo consoles, one can see that Nintendo has ALWAYS dominated sales on their own consoles with their IP related to Mario, Zelda, etc. So again, how justified is that criticism of EA?

"We believe much of the blame for this goes to prior management, which failed to incubate new hit franchises heading into this cycle and let aging franchises decline..."How about looking at current mangement? Things were going along swimmingly well until they brought in the "new" marketing based contingent...

Maybe if EA wasn't so short sighted they wouldn't be in such a bind. It takes quality people and investments over time to make a mega hit. How many Call of Duties did that team make before they hit gold with CoD4? There have been 8 or so GTAs leading up to the latest. There were three Prince of Persias leading up to Assassin's Creed. The EA internal teams have seen the good people leave or been squeezed out by the dim-witted suits. The internal politics of that place make it a nightmare, and it is no wonder they have to BUY quality studios since they can't BREED quality with their backwards and outdated management.

No sure I agree with your analysis. Yes revenue is down, but quality is up. I think this year will see much better fortunes for EA.

I agree with comments made by "Me". The GTA franchise is a bit of a tower of cards. One bad release and the whole thing could tumble down.

EA spent a small fortune to purchase Bioware and Pandemic. Having worked for Pandemic before the merger I have a bit of an inside perspective. The plan, as it was stated to both groups, was to leave Pandemic and Bioware alone since both companies were performing well.

EA being EA though reneged.

During the first round of EA layoffs management mandated that Pandemic come up with several million to help offset the bad third quarter earning reports. The only way Pandemic could do that was to lay-off employees. The same applied for Bioware. In the process Pandemic laid-off the majority of the LOTR:Conquest team with the game __2 months away from final__!

It's bad decisions like this that will ultimately decrease EA's long-term value. No game studio, lays off right before final.

It's those last couple of months where polish is introduced and the remaining major bugs are fixed. In this case the game will ship with both major bugs and zero polish, because EA / Pandemic opted to lay off the majority of the engineering team.

That's not a good way to increase customer confidence. EA has stated time and again they're trying for higher quality games. The lay-offs particularly on the LOTR:Conquest team proves to me that it's marketing speak. As an investor my confidence in EA management is very low and I think the stock value correctly reflects where the company is unfortunately headed.

What about SecuRom/DRM! I skipped at least 5 EA titles because of this insult on the consumers and so did many other gamers.

What if the title is really great but fails to sell. The most amazing game of the time was Planescape Torment and it wasn't the best seller.

When they say their strategy of "quality", I think that means that some stupid manager who thinks the game will not sell will cancel the games because they are not copies of popular games. That's why I hate companies who try to treat video games as pure business. Hire gamers who understand business guys.

@all commenters: I was not making the point that Electronic Arts has failed to create titles which exhibit excellent quality and which sell very well, I was just presenting the fact that some consider the publisher unable to take advantage of the Wii while failing to totally uphold the idea of "quality over quantity"...