mogamer: 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.

Egotomb: Not sure this is a bad idea from their POV, the less games there are on the shelves the more chance there is that the customer will buy one of yours.

DarrkPhoenix: 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.

drmlessgames: 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 ?

akwater: Foreign owners of US Treasury Securities (September 2009)
Nation billions of dollars percentage
People's Republic of China 798.9 B 23.35%
Japan 751.5 B 21.13%
United Kingdom 249.3 B 6.42%
Oil exporters 185.3 B 5.52%
Caribbean banking centers 171.7 B 5.64%
http://www.treas.gov/tic/mfh.txt
Not quite a Trllion but... the quarter is new :) and someone had to get that bailout all paid up... and at 700Billion.... Well lets hope China and Japan continue to buy our debt lol..

Delixe: 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.

Stuff: Wall Steet Logic:
"In our view, the company has excellent assets, but continues to spend too much money in creating and marketing them."
Not sure how spending less on creating and marketing will help sales. Shareholders seem to be EA's main concern nowadays.

lukaszthegreat: I actually agree with that.
Best (worst) example is which come into my mind is oblivion. Picard? really? was he really needed there? or a great voice actor at a tenth of the cost would perform similarly.
Fallout 3 had the same with PC dad (whose name i don't remember but apparently is a big deal.
or maybe it is not that big of a deal: a single actor and ads milked it...
What the guy said that EA should cut costs on making games and promotion. Not to cut quality or effectiveness but just costs as a single product costs a lot but doesn't bring enough dough to justify the investment.
which can be done somewhere else where an invested dollar bring bigger cut.
The good thing is i believe we are going there. The closer we get to ultrarealistic graphic the cheaper it should be to make a game. Right now it is opposite as more complex engines take more work to make them... work.
but if we hit the mark then the engines will be tweaked not reworked.