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Forget about SA saving UO, what is going to save EA?
- Thread starter MerchantAtHome
- Start date
- Watchers 0
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DarkScripture
Guest
I wish UO would break off from EA and regroup the old Origin team.
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dielock
Guest
Time to find Lord British and ask for bailout relief. Oh yeah, almost forgot. After EA gets the bailout money, lets make sure their top execs, (who caused their demise) get a nice fat bonus right after they lay off a majority of their workforce.
One word, "Apple" ...la
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wrekognize
Guest
This sure validates your opinions in the unabalanced dread warhorse thread.
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Helfgrim
Guest
Sims3, the upcoming season of sports titles, and other projects waiting in the wings will certainly help.
S
Stratic Fanatic
Guest
No biggie. They lost a billion. Pocket change.
The profits from 27 years of success makes a nice nest egg. They made 4.2 Billion profit just last year.
The profits from 27 years of success makes a nice nest egg. They made 4.2 Billion profit just last year.
That report's not all doom & gloom, they made money, lots of it.
I don't see them going belly up.......maybe Madden 2012, there's an intresting title.
And hell yeah, UO needs to get away from EA all together.
I don't see them going belly up.......maybe Madden 2012, there's an intresting title.
And hell yeah, UO needs to get away from EA all together.
K
Kratos Aurion
Guest
I wonder how much of that gets stuffed into bonus stockings for all the top execs and CEOs who make irrational sums of money compared to the work they do?No biggie. They lost a billion. Pocket change.
The profits from 27 years of success makes a nice nest egg. They made 4.2 Billion profit just last year.
Considering it's a one billion dollar loss, would that even be a reason to b*%$h to the public or are they just looking for sympathy from their fan boys to up the revenue stream for 09'
4.2 Billion in Revenue, not profit. Huge difference. For example, I work for Disney and am looking at our 2008 Annual report. We had revenue of 37.8 billion for 2008. After all the breakdown of where everything went, we are left with a Net Income of 4.4 billion. Sure, it sounds badass to say we made 37.8 billion but in reality, after operating cost alone of 30.4 billion, we only made 4.4 billion.No biggie. They lost a billion. Pocket change.
The profits from 27 years of success makes a nice nest egg. They made 4.2 Billion profit just last year.
I can't find a link to the numbers yet but I'd be surprised if EA made more than 1.5 billion in Net Income. A few months ago I saw a Wall Street journal article to do with why EA's profits were lower than forecast. Long story short is EA's products were selling at the projected volume however profits were down which lead the analyst to conclude EA was very poorly mis-managed. I'm sure that comes as no surprise to any of us
Anyways, EA is ripe for the picking right now if one of the major players decided to go for it. In the last 6 months I've seen on our internal portal almost a dozen a stories having to do with "Why Disney should buy EA" 
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Sunrise
Guest
They got war..they got other things up there sleeves...ya its a BIG loss..Mostly for the STOCK holders...But just like death and taxes...EA will be here for alot longer than most of us think..its a business..Everyone is hurting..as long as they can keep there heads heck there bodies above water which they are doing......
Which means..NOW is the time to invest!!! For in a year or two..when everything finallly recovers and shoots up faster on the stock market faster than a speed hacker with Great ping....We will all be kicking ourselves for not investing...
Just my two cents..But honestly...this is great news for someone like me.. For EA games is NOT going anywhere fast....and I do watch the market....
I get worried when people get greedy...I get greedy when people worry.... Buy low..sell high..thats the American way...
Which means..NOW is the time to invest!!! For in a year or two..when everything finallly recovers and shoots up faster on the stock market faster than a speed hacker with Great ping....We will all be kicking ourselves for not investing...
Just my two cents..But honestly...this is great news for someone like me.. For EA games is NOT going anywhere fast....and I do watch the market....
I get worried when people get greedy...I get greedy when people worry.... Buy low..sell high..thats the American way...
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Stratic Fanatic
Guest
You are correct. I misread.
After looking around I saw on Wiki that it was $454 million USD net profit. (If the wiki is accurate)
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rayvowrath
Guest
I agree
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Connor_Graham
Guest
Only.....
No one here thinks that EA is a well-run company.
But think about this...
MMOs, including UO, make tons of profit. But, unless they are on the World of Warcraft scale, and only that particular game is on that scale, it's not the kind of money that "wows" (sorry for the pun) a big company.
So let's take EA. They see UO being "wildly profitable," and yet, according to Mark Jacobs, they still wanted to shut it down before they put it under his wing.
I can only presume that this is because EA's management isn't terribly rational, and only understands profit on a large scale.
So.....If a company is large enough to successfully buy EA....Might they be even LESS likely to understand the MMO business model (large profit relative to investment, but small monthly dollar amounrs). And might UO thus be in even more trouble? Most of us don't care much about, say, EA's latest sports game. Which is likely to go forward no matter who actually owns EA.
-Galen's player
But think about this...
MMOs, including UO, make tons of profit. But, unless they are on the World of Warcraft scale, and only that particular game is on that scale, it's not the kind of money that "wows" (sorry for the pun) a big company.
So let's take EA. They see UO being "wildly profitable," and yet, according to Mark Jacobs, they still wanted to shut it down before they put it under his wing.
I can only presume that this is because EA's management isn't terribly rational, and only understands profit on a large scale.
So.....If a company is large enough to successfully buy EA....Might they be even LESS likely to understand the MMO business model (large profit relative to investment, but small monthly dollar amounrs). And might UO thus be in even more trouble? Most of us don't care much about, say, EA's latest sports game. Which is likely to go forward no matter who actually owns EA.
-Galen's player
I don't know anything about the gaming industry, I just play UOAnyways, EA is ripe for the picking right now if one of the major players decided to go for it. In the last 6 months I've seen on our internal portal almost a dozen a stories having to do with "Why Disney should buy EA"
but I always thought that EA was the major player there, and everyone else kinda trying to keep up.. Disney's a bigger company, for sure, but most of that is movies, yes?
kelmo
Old and in the way
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Disney is a major player in the computer interactive market. They also have MMOs. A pirate game featuring the Pirates of the Caribbean springs to mind. This is not the first time I have heard rumors of Mickey thinking of acquiring EA.
It is not beyond the realm of feasibility that EA is showing the loss as a posturing. As to the reason why, I could only guess...
It is not beyond the realm of feasibility that EA is showing the loss as a posturing. As to the reason why, I could only guess...
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Thangorodrim
Guest
I think you nailed it.
EA can only understand profits that scale into the billions.
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Stratic Fanatic
Guest
Heres more for those interested....too much for my lazy self to read
http://investor.ea.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=381903
http://investor.ea.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=381903
But do we think that Disney or Apple will be any better?
Who knows, maybe they would....Maybe they'd be like "hey, it's a steady revenue stream. Small by our scale, but steady as all Hell, and holy crap it's almost all profit!! Neat! Way better than that lame Pirate game we have!!"
*shrugs* I really don't know. I guess we really have no actual choice but to play the game and see how things turn out.
-Galen's player
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Kratos Aurion
Guest
EA has and always will only be good for console gaming (in their current structure). Their games are extremely short lived, and usually reproduced every year, like Madden etc. Their creative scale doesn't get anymore complex than that (no offense to the many developers who work for EA).
On the other hand, Disney, who holds immense creativity; If they aquire EA, then there are chances the EA titles would get increasingly "better", but it would probably result in an industry of MMOs/Console games that are highly policed and targeted towards younger kids.
I would have higher hopes for Apple, who in the passed decade, has proved to be an innovative and successful company. But why would Apple want a gaming company? They are currently rocking the music industry, and slowly falling. Maybe that would be an incentive but I don't believe that Apple would actually buy EA.
If anything, EA should sell the titles of the games they drop.
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Sunrise
Guest
na...coming from a warplayer...I do beleive that number should be higher....--The most recent info on Warhammer Online puts the game's dedicated player base at 300,000.
EA games just like everything else..will change and still be around in 10 20 30 years...You either change with the current..or you get sucked in and drowned.
I may be mis-understanding what you mean by "na". I took it as you disagreed with my qoute. It's a quote from a quarterly conference call from EA to it's investors.... If I'm reading it right. It does seem awfully low tho. But I'm not a warplayer.
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Bluebottle
Guest
EA (like most entertainment) is in dire straits financially and operationally, there has been a series of layoffs, a ton of product delays or cancellations. Ironically, UO even though its a niche operation in the grand scheme of things is likely a relative "cash cow" for EA but at some point it may be declared sunset. The console sales are hurting with the increasing saturation of the market. Effective online content delivery and management is the new target that EA needs to get a grip on if they are to survive.
How's it seem low? It's about triple UO's and UO's certainly seems to be over DAoC's.
Frankly, if they were smart, that should be about in-line with expectations. Sure they had a lot more until the trial period ran out! But 300k sounds like a perfectly reasonable, profitable number to me.
-Galen's player
They were at 750k accounts at launch... if everyone is telling the truth here. That is what my "seems low" comment was based on. Profitable or not, it would seem that (in the first year) an MMO would pick up more subs if it were doing well and loose subs if it wasn't.
It's very simple logic but any explanation to any scenario outside of that simple logic is just how you choose to spin it... The word "dedicated" in that quote leaves alot to speculation. Which is another red flag.
Madden actually has a lawsuit pending against it. If it goes through...goodbye Madden. Well...let me rephrase that, goodbye to the college sports ones.
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guum
Guest
I know it sounds bitter (as evidenced in earlier posts), but I have to kinda add one to the "I hope they go bankrupt" sentiment...over the past 15 years, I have seen EA buy out one outstanding game studio after another, shutting down some of the most promising ones, diluting the products of many of the others, all in the name of consolidation and in pursuit of mega-profits best embodied by their brainless sports titles. I don't want UO to go away, and there are definitely still some good titles produced under the EA umbrella, but EA itself is not a good thing for the gaming industry, and hasn't been since the 80s.
I'm probably getting jaded with large numbers...but while 1 bil is no small sum, if you look at the financial sector, you'll realize that 1 bil in losses is just a small dip in the pool. These people are losing hundreds of billions...
So not only the game industry is hurting. Almost everyone else is hurting bad.
In situations like these though, the larger and better capitalized companies like EA will be the ones that have the best chances of surviving. And will snarf up smaller companies on the cheap. Which is what EA has been doing all this time. Returns on these investments won't be realized for the next year or 2, so this is what is driving down their net profits.
Besides, more people are expected to resort to cheaper entertainment like games during economic downturns.
When EA emerge from the downturn, they will be stronger and be pretty much a resource powerhouse to cater to huge chunks of the market.
Might not be good thing for the industry if all their competition gets gobbled up though. But EA will definitely survive.
So not only the game industry is hurting. Almost everyone else is hurting bad.
In situations like these though, the larger and better capitalized companies like EA will be the ones that have the best chances of surviving. And will snarf up smaller companies on the cheap. Which is what EA has been doing all this time. Returns on these investments won't be realized for the next year or 2, so this is what is driving down their net profits.
Besides, more people are expected to resort to cheaper entertainment like games during economic downturns.
When EA emerge from the downturn, they will be stronger and be pretty much a resource powerhouse to cater to huge chunks of the market.
Might not be good thing for the industry if all their competition gets gobbled up though. But EA will definitely survive.
Is there anything you don't want to see destroyed?
Have to say I completely agree. I have some friends and know some people who started playing UO as well as other games in order to help save money and cut down on entertainment and going out costs.
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Zodia
Guest
Lord British is coming back! He will save EA! 
unfortunately, blizzard is the major gaming company with titles such as starcraft, warcraft 1-3, diablo 1 and 2, and of course world of warcraft, soon to be starcraft 2 and diablo 3 and i hear blizzard is working on another mmorpg as well, im not a fan of blizzard its just amazing how many people play their games, most mmorpgs have less than 1 million subscribers and wow has like 14 million, that annoys me greatly because where were those 14 million people to play uo between 1997 and 2004 before wow even existed? they wouldn't have even played wow if they were playing uoI don't know anything about the gaming industry, I just play UO
I think it depends who you ask frankly. Lineage II has more than 17 million subscribers. I won't provide a link since that is ready information on the internet from various reputable sources.
The better answer is to look at profits. Blizzard is actually a conglomerate of Vivendi, who is a huge media mogul that owns 20% of NBC Universal. Their net earnings are 649 million Euro's, DOWN 48 million from last year. Value converted to US dollars would be $918,742,922. So their parent company comes in a shade under 1 billion dollars.
Please note also that Vivendi owns 52% of the US company Activision Blizzard. link confirming that is here > http://www.sk-gaming.com/content/18315-Vivendi_profits_boosted_by_Blizzard.
Profit
Link is here > http://www.vivendi.com/vivendi/IMG/pdf/20090514_PR_resultats_1er_trimestre_2009_en.pdf
NC Soft on the other hand > http://news.bigdownload.com/2009/02/14/ncsoft-reveals-latest-financial-figures/
had profits totaling 248.6 million dollars. Their total profits for 2008 were 346,834,057,000 won OR $ 278 million dollars.
EA on the other hand is at $860 million and that is considering falling from 1.3 billion in revenue.
http://www.physorg.com/news160765948.html
Conclusion is EA doesn't need anything to save them and subscription numbers aren't the only thing to look at in the world of real-life business. Both EA and Vivendi have sales that come from many other things than just MMPORPG's. NCSoft on the other hand is a computer game company.