This negative figure hasn’t landed out of the blue, EA has been preparing for their own little financial Judgement day by cutting staff and studio numbers.
While other areas are looking pretty great for the publishing giant, they pale in comparison to such a hefty kick in the balance sheet. EA Partners have submitted their strongest year yet.
Fiscal 2009 highlights for EA, courtesy of VE3D:
EA had 31 titles that sold more than one million copies in the year – as compared with 27 titles in the prior year.
FIFA 09, Madden NFL 09 and Need for Speed Undercover each sold over five million copies in the year.
EA Partners posted its strongest year ever driven by Rock Band, Rock Band 2 and Left 4 Dead. Rock Band, in partnership with MTX/Harmonix, was EA’s highest revenue producing title during the fiscal year.
EA strengthened its portfolio by launching new games – SPORE, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, Dead Space, Mirror’s Edge, Boom Blox, Mercenaries 2 and a slate of Hasbro games.
SPORE sold over two million copies with users generating more than 100 million creatures.
EA generated 14% of its total non-GAAP revenue on the Wii – as compared with 8% a year ago. EA to ship EA SPORTS Active in May and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in June. Also in June, Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 10 and EA SPORTS Grand Slam Tennis – both bundled with the Wii MotionPlus accessory (Tennis bundle available in Europe only).
EA’s non-GAAP digital services revenue, which includes online and wireless, was $429 million in fiscal 2009, up 27% year-over-year.
Pogo achieved an all-time high of 1.8M paying subscribers for the fiscal year.
EA recently launched the open beta of EA SPORTS FIFA Online 2 in China – the Company’s first online game in China.
EA Mobile, the world’s leading publisher of games for wireless, delivered non-GAAP revenue of $189 million for fiscal 2009 – up 24 percent year-over-year.
All-in-all FY09 was pretty crappy for EA when staring closely at the big picture, but that means this fiscal should be much better now that the bumpy part of the recession has moved on. There was recent talk of Apple looking to snap up EA but analyst Michael Pachter dismissed the idea as practically insane.
”To say that it is idiotic would be an insult to all idiots,” Wedbush Morgan’s Pachter vented to VG247.
