Bear in mind the analysts on Marketwatch are 50 year old men who hate fun. They don't get the idea of playing games.
The article has more abbreviations than my mind can handle.

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half!" - John Wanamaker

Neither do EA execs and shareholders.

Sorry . . . didn't mean for you to actually read it . . . just referencing the quote. . . .=) . . . It seemed ironic that the solution for EA, in Wall Steets opinion, is to spend less on the content creation, make a product . . . it does not need to be good product . . .

Capitalism's weird, eh?
I figured that out when I realized that Communist China is the biggest lender to the United States. There's probably a Jon Stewart comment on that somewhere, but I just thought that was pretty nuts.

I agree, it's weird and disconcerting as well . . .all about profit once corporations enter the picture. How can we make the most profit on this [ insert a product or service here] is their only focus. Their influence on the gaming industry has been detrimental IMHO.
China owns us now it seems . . .=)

Activision's attitude?
Or EA wants their title "biggest evil of gaming industry" back at all costs?

Course once the profits dry up . . .the layoffs begin and funding drys up as well.
It will be interesting to see what gaming looks like in 5 yrs . . .=)

I don't think it's asking too much for EA to cut production costs. Look at Mass Effect 2. Bioware is using high priced Hollywood talent as voice actors. There are plenty of animation/video game talent out there that probably cost 1/2 of what those people are making.
And look at pc gaming. Does a company really need to take the tiime to create a super powerful game engine that needs a quad-core cpu and 1 gb of Vram? A more modestly priced, less complicated game engine that takes less time to create will work just fine.
And EA has a nasty habit of buying up studios only to close them down in a few years. The money that's wasted by doing that, could have been spent to hire more developers. And don't say it's because EA wanted those IP's. Look at how many IP's EA has wasted over the years.
Those are just a few examples where a developer/publisher can cut back. When a company that makes as many games as EA can cut the little things. That will add up fast.

In fairness EA has not done that in years. Pandemic was the exception but in Pandemic's case they were continuing to make poor quality games and they were not selling. Eventually EA just stopped paying the bills.

EA's got a long way to go before they regain that crown. Thanks to Activision, second place in the Most Evil Games Companies chart is a very distant second.

At the risk of sounding ignorant and stupid, what do you mean by china being the usa's biggest lender nowadays? Everyone has a debt in china institutions ?

First article I could find, hope it gives you a few insights on the US/China relationship.

I've been saying pretty much the same thing as that analysis for a while now: EA is bringing in plenty of money... they're just spending even more than that. One thing I'm wondering is just how much of the costs in total is being spent on marketing. With many AAA games the marketing budget actually ends up surpassing the development budget, and I have a hard time believing that the ROI when spending that much on marketing is particularly good.