Originally posted by Tah Gut:
....EA killed Air Warrior, soon after they killed Jane's, and for reasons left very much unexplained IMHO.
No magic to the explanation. They are first and foremost a business, whose primary function is to produce a profit for their shareholders, not to be a religious experience for us as players.
EA.COM is financially bleeding to death. For the first six months, this division's sales went up 75% while their net financial losses increased by almost 44% over the previous year. You can't sell $31 million dollars in six months while losing $48 million on those same sales and expect to maintain all of the product lines. They're obviously taking drastic measures to cut the worst of the cash burners, which apparently AW and some other titles must have been at the top of the list.
Their CEO said, "We continue to have high confidence in our online business and are on track to deliver significant top line growth for the year. We are also committed to our target of achieving a break even run rate in FY'03 and have taken steps to significantly reduce our operating costs going forward. We will focus on monetizing the traffic and stickiness of our site through advertising sales, while delivering rich online persistent state worlds to drive our subscription business. As we look forward, we are excited about the market opportunity for next generation consoles, the PC and online gaming and are enthusiastic about the upcoming holiday season."
It's worth noting that with their core business (excluding EA.COM) and on a consolidated basis, they're actually increasing revenues and market share over competitors, while reducing their losses over time. Apparently they're committed to the on-line business and have been searching for other titles that might be more profitable. They did look at iEN's Warbirds and walked away which was not surprising, as did UbiSoft, Sony and others.
Just my opinion....
Reference:
http://www.info.ea.com/invest/earnings_release.php[ 12-12-2001: Message edited by: Badger ]
