Is EA doing ok now? I guess I haven't checked their stock in a while, but wasn't it tanking not too long ago? And TOR was a bit of a miss, so that can't have helped.
Then again, I'm sure Battlefield, Madden, FIFA and the money from Origin are helping absorb those misses.
I guess I am just skeptical that with any amount of marketing or extra development time, something like Dragon Age would reach 5-10 million copies sold. At least without BioWare/EA fundamentally changing the nature of the game. How did Mass Effect 3 end up selling? Cause that would seem about as easily accessible and mainstream a "BioWare" game that BioWare could make, but I don't recall it lighting any sales charts on fire or anything.
Well, one thing to consider is that stock price isn't necessarily reflective of a company's balance sheet.
EA's GAAP earnings waver between making a little bit and losing a little bit, but they're growing a huge amount of deferred revenue because all of their games have multiplayer, and official accounting rules require them to report that as income over the expected lifetime of a game's multiplayer.
This is why EA's cash pile grew enough that they could buy companies like PopCap and PlayFish and still do a $1.1 billion stock buyback (composed of separate $600M and $500M buybacks) while retaining billions in the bank.
The other consideration is that something that comes out and bombs has already been paid for. The bombing just means that they don't earn as much money as they would like back from the product, not that they lose the whole development cost upon release.
Mass Effect 3 did over $200 million in revenue by their May fiscal report, which if we assume EA received an average of $50 in revenue per unit (considering retailer selling price and collectors editions/DLC), we would calculate 4 million units up front. We know they shipped at least 3.5 million week one, so if the game ends up at 5 million it wouldn't surprise me.
As for Dragon Age, we know the first two games ended up at 8 million combined as per the Dragon Age 3 announcement press release, so they're pretty close to that range already.
I imagine their plan for growth is a large increase in production values, more content, and the addition of co-op, which helps get multiple people to buy games new to play together when successful.