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(Sales Age) Earnings time again (Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, UBI)

thy_

Member
Captain Smoker said:
Overview (FY3 2009)
Code:
Company			Original Revenue	Average Ex. Rate	Income in US $

Ubisoft			€ 68,800,000		0.70740			$ 48,669,120
SCE: Operating Income

All Other: Net Income

Should'nt € 68m be about $ 90m ?
Or am I missing something?
 

Johann

Member
test_account said:
Did EA lose 1 billion dollars? If so, that is alot of money :\ How do they lose that much money by the way? Did that many EA released/published games sell poorly?

EA has a lot of problems with growing their company.

- Several of their big games are based off licensed properties rather than in-house IPs. Warner Brother has gained control of the Lord of the Rings license. Pandemic's Lord of the Rings: Conquest was one of their few bright spot earlier this year.

- The profit from their successful EA partners program is diluted.

- Their new IPs failed to be huge hits. It's incredibly difficult to make successful sequels if the original didn't catch on.

- Need for Speed: Undercover underperformed last year. There is probably a fear at EA that their once reliable franchises are at risk of stagnating.

- Their big in-house shooter, Medal of Honor, has failed to grow into a mega-hit like Call of Duty and it's approaching obscurity through a lack of recent releases.

- Shooters such as Army of Two and Battlefield: Bad Company will have difficulty growing in the face of the sheer dominance of Gears and CoD. These 'flavor of the month' shooters have failed to have the successful multiplayer community and leggy sales of a shooter like Call of Duty: World at War.

- After a lengthy development cycle, Spore didn't end up being a mega-franchise through which EA could make easy money through six month expansions.

- Despite a good subscriber honeymoon, Warhammer Online has been struggling ever since. It's about 200K users below the target subscriber base.

- Rock Band (and the rhythm genre in general) has experienced decline after peaking in 2007. It's getting more and more expensive to manufacture and ship peripherals due to the increasing costs of plastics and fuel. As a result, it's getting more difficult to grow the Rock Band userbase and pool of instruments in households. EA cites this as one of their biggest sources of revenue but it's also one of the most costly products to make in the entire industry, so much that it's probably causing EA and MTV Games to lose money in order to produce it.

Acti-Blizzard has also been affected by this but has managed it better through Guitar Hero's popularity and higher allocation of disc-only copies of games. Another advantage for Guitar Hero is that it's managed to capture the Wii audience, which grown into a very significant userbase for rhythm games. Rock Band has failed to establish itself on the Wii.




Essentially, EA attempted to increase output (heavy R&D, a large, diverse and risky portfolio, Bioware-Pandemic acquisition, the [failed] Take 2 attempt) but they haven't experienced the sales growth needed to sustain such behavior.
 

Chumly

Member
gtj1092 said:
And what happened to marvelous or sega or THQ?
Wow you could pick out worse examples to further your agenda?

THQ exclusively puts big money on the 360/PS3 and it obviously hasnt worked out well for them.

Sega has had absolutely pathetic sales from the 360/PS3 along with other problems that have overshadowed its great success (Wii)

Closest one you got to making a point was Marvelous which obviously has issues but wouldnt be solved by making HD projects.
 

[Nintex]

Member
gtj1092 said:
And what happened to marvelous or sega or THQ?
SEGA doesn't know how to make money, when you give SEGA $5 to buy a burger and a milkshake, they come back with a $1000 debt and a coke.
 

apujanata

Member
Captain Smoker said:
You're completely right. :p

fixed. :)
Code:
Company			Original Revenue	Average Ex. Rate	Income in US $
Ubisoft			€ 68,800,000		1.42447			$ 98,003,536

Shouldn't the Original revenue column called "original income" ? Since Income =/= Revenue, and it seems that you are referring to profit/loss (income), instead of sales (revenue).

I think it is better to call them "original profit/loss" and "profit/loss in US $", since income COULD be interpreted as revenue (for non-financial terms).
 

Eteric Rice

Member
[Nintex] said:
SEGA doesn't know how to make money, when you give SEGA $5 to buy a burger and a milkshake, they come back with a $1000 debt and a coke.

I laughed out loud at this for some reason. :lol
 

test_account

XP-39C²
donny2112 said:
They bet on the wrong horse, and their new IPs from last Fall didn't take off.
Bet on the wrong horse in what way, by not making more Wii games or by making new IPs that wasnt really that successful? But still, i think that 1 billion dollars is alot of money to lose. And did EA's new IP really sell that bad?



Johann said:
EA has a lot of problems with growing their company.

- Several of their big games are based off licensed properties rather than in-house IPs. Warner Brother has gained control of the Lord of the Rings license. Pandemic's Lord of the Rings: Conquest was one of their few bright spot earlier this year.

- The profit from their successful EA partners program is diluted.

- Their new IPs failed to be huge hits. It's incredibly difficult to make successful sequels if the original didn't catch on.

- Need for Speed: Undercover underperformed last year. There is probably a fear at EA that their once reliable franchises are at risk of stagnating.

- Their big in-house shooter, Medal of Honor, has failed to grow into a mega-hit like Call of Duty and it's approaching obscurity through a lack of recent releases.

- Shooters such as Army of Two and Battlefield: Bad Company will have difficulty growing in the face of the sheer dominance of Gears and CoD. These 'flavor of the month' shooters have failed to have the successful multiplayer community and leggy sales of a shooter like Call of Duty: World at War.

- After a lengthy development cycle, Spore didn't end up being a mega-franchise through which EA could make easy money through six month expansions.

- Despite a good subscriber honeymoon, Warhammer Online has been struggling ever since. It's about 200K users below the target subscriber base.

- Rock Band (and the rhythm genre in general) has experienced decline after peaking in 2007. It's getting more and more expensive to manufacture and ship peripherals due to the increasing costs of plastics and fuel. As a result, it's getting more difficult to grow the Rock Band userbase and pool of instruments in households. EA cites this as one of their biggest sources of revenue but it's also one of the most costly products to make in the entire industry, so much that it's probably causing EA and MTV Games to lose money in order to produce it.

Acti-Blizzard has also been affected by this but has managed it better through Guitar Hero's popularity and higher allocation of disc-only copies of games. Another advantage for Guitar Hero is that it's managed to capture the Wii audience, which grown into a very significant userbase for rhythm games. Rock Band has failed to establish itself on the Wii.




Essentially, EA attempted to increase output (heavy R&D, a large, diverse and risky portfolio, Bioware-Pandemic acquisition, the [failed] Take 2 attempt) but they haven't experienced the sales growth needed to sustain such behavior.
About games being based of licensed properties, in what way does this affect the money income? I guess that they make less money, since the license owner are also getting their share of the money as well?

Ye, some of EA's new IPs havnt become huge hits as you say, but didnt several of them sell at least ok? For example, Army of Two, Battlefield Bad Company and Mirrors Edge are all getting sequels, doesnt this mean that these 3 games sold at least ok?

About R&D, what does this cover? And did EA buy Bioware-Pandemic? If so, maybe this is where alot of money were spent, and how much was spent? How did the Take 2 attempt go by the way, did EA lose any money on that?

1 billion dollar seems to be alot of money to lose on making games. I know that EA is a big company though, but still, i think that 1 billion dollar is still alot of money to lose on making games. I am just wondering on what specificly caused EA to lose this much money.

That is a detailed and good reply by you by the way :)
 

AniHawk

Member
[Nintex] said:
SEGA doesn't know how to make money, when you give SEGA $5 to buy a burger and a milkshake, they come back with a $1000 debt and a coke.

Actually, I thought Sega was successful more recently, and it's actually Sammy that's dragging the company down now.
 

Johann

Member
test_account said:
About games being based of licensed properties, in what way does this affect the money income? I guess that they make less money, since the license owner are also getting their share of the money as well?

The advantages of a license property is that it usually increases the appeal of your game and provides a sales safety net for it. If you land on something like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, your game is set.

The big problem is that the license holder is usually the dominate party in the relationship. There are the typical problems of the license holder putting creative constraints on the game or the pressure to release the game by a hard deadline (i.e. a movie's release). We've seen how games such as Wanted and Riddick perform when there isn't any movie marketing behind the licensed game. The license holder also could demand a significant portion of the royalties, they could charge a fortune for an exclusive contract, and they control the direction of the IP.

If you had the Harry Potter license, what would you do after the book and the movie adaptations end? Even though Lord of the Rings: Conquest sold over a million, it still well short of the sales of the trilogy-based games. What if you get the Matrix license but the movies lose popularity? If you have the Pixar license, what would you do if you got an unorthodox setting like Up instead a ready for gaming setting like Cars? The license holder has great influence over the success and growth of the games.

A publisher can't continuously rely on a licensed IP as the breadwinner. There is not much control they have over the IP's popularity and growth. Some IP holders are beginning to realize the popularity of their IPs in gaming and forming internal studios for them, most notably Disney and Warner Brothers.

test_account said:
Ye, some of EA's new IPs havnt become huge hits as you say, but didnt several of them sell at least ok? For example, Army of Two, Battlefield Bad Company and Mirrors Edge are all getting sequels, doesnt this mean that these 3 games sold at least ok?

One of the difficult parts of running a business is that you are going to make a mistake sooner or later. Even a well-oiled business is eventually going to slip up. The key is to minimize your losses and make your success so overwhelming that it makes up for the losses.

A lot of games don't make a profit or even make it past development, such as EA's Tiberium. It's isn't enough for a game to break even or make a small profit these days, they have to be such an overwhelming success to make up for the company's other failures. With the average cost of creating a game increasing, it's that much more important that losses are minimized. That's not getting into opportunity costs in which it would be better use of company resources if a developer made several small games with a low break even points rather slog away years on a game that ends up merely selling decently. There is always that temptation that leads a company into believing that they just need to make the next GTA or Halo and they are set.

These days, a lot of developers invest heavily in the first game in a new franchise. If the game is a huge success, subsequent games are less of a risk because of lower developed due to shared technology and the franchise gaining popularity. EA's games have failed to be that Assassin's Creed or Gears of War level hit. While Mirror's Edge 2 could reinvent the franchise, I can't see Army of Two or Bad Company suddenly under going growth or even coming close to the success of the leaders in each game's genre. The typical sales direction for a sequel is typically downward.

test_account said:
About R&D, what does this cover? And did EA buy Bioware-Pandemic? If so, maybe this is where alot of money were spent, and how much was spent? How did the Take 2 attempt go by the way, did EA lose any money on that?

As mention before, EA had prepared for the 360 and PS3 becoming the dominate console in the industry. Their R&D was in the neighborhood of over half a billion dollars. They have failed to establish their next-gen new IPs and previously strong series, such as Medal of Honor, has failed to stand up to the competition. A lot of the money they invested hasn't translated to significant or consistent success or growth in the HD front.

EA's acquisition of Pandemic and Bioware cost the company over $800 million ($860 million IIRC). Most of that was in cash. The Bioware had deals with Microsoft and Sega at the time and were at the tail-end of development for them. In face of talk of overpaying, EA said the acquisition was a long term project for diversifying the company portfolio. It remains to be seen if Saboteur and Dragon Age will be successful.

The whole Take-2 bid was just humiliating. EA obviously wanted control over the GTA franchise. They continued to delay the deadline when Take Two didn't budge. Take-Two had good news in the form of GTA4 over-performing (both Take 2 and EA's expectations) and other bits of positive news, such as the Bioshock movie deal.

The whole event cost the company about $21 million in various legal fees, which is a significant amount of the overall $300 million loss they company would later reveal in its reports. EA's stock (and Take 2's stock as well) declined following the incident.
 

donny2112

Member
test_account said:
Bet on the wrong horse in what way,

In case you missed the reference, those are EA's own words to describe their performance this generation. They recognized that not putting more push behind the market leader had limited their audience and directly led to their reduced profitability this generation. It was part of what led them to increase their Wii output this fiscal year.
 

test_account

XP-39C²
Johann said:
The advantages of a license property is that it usually increases the appeal of your game and provides a sales safety net for it. If you land on something like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, your game is set.

The big problem is that the license holder is usually the dominate party in the relationship. There are the typical problems of the license holder putting creative constraints on the game or the pressure to release the game by a hard deadline (i.e. a movie's release). We've seen how games such as Wanted and Riddick perform when there isn't any movie marketing behind the licensed game. The license holder also could demand a significant portion of the royalties, they could charge a fortune for an exclusive contract, and they control the direction of the IP.

If you had the Harry Potter license, what would you do after the book and the movie adaptations end? Even though Lord of the Rings: Conquest sold over a million, it still well short of the sales of the trilogy-based games. What if you get the Matrix license but the movies lose popularity? If you have the Pixar license, what would you do if you got an unorthodox setting like Up instead a ready for gaming setting like Cars? The license holder has great influence over the success and growth of the games.

A publisher can't continuously rely on a licensed IP as the breadwinner. There is not much control they have over the IP's popularity and growth. Some IP holders are beginning to realize the popularity of their IPs in gaming and forming internal studios for them, most notably Disney and Warner Brothers.
Ye, i see what you mean :) When those licenced franchices (like Harry Potter for example) doesnt have a book or a movie comming out, releasing a game within this franchice might not sell as well compared to if the game comes out at about the same time as a new book or a movie.

But when these franchices loses popularity, doesnt they usually stop to make games for these franchises as well? For example, i think that the last Matrix game came out in 2005. There are some expections though, like Lord of the Rings: Conquest as you mentioned. This game came out some years after the last Lord of the Rings movie.

By the way, did Lord of the Rings: Conquest make money or did they lose money on it? Granted that the game probably didnt sell as well as the trioligy-based games as you said, but did it still make some money?


Johann said:
One of the difficult parts of running a business is that you are going to make a mistake sooner or later. Even a well-oiled business is eventually going to slip up. The key is to minimize your losses and make your success so overwhelming that it makes up for the losses.
Ye, that is true. I was mostly wondering where EA had their losses in their fiscal year of 2008

EDIT: Or does this 1 billion dollar that EA lost count for the last 3 years or so in total, or did EA lose 1 billion dollar in their fiscal year of 2008 alone?


Johann said:
A lot of games don't make a profit or even make it past development, such as EA's Tiberium. It's isn't enough for a game to break even or make a small profit these days, they have to be such an overwhelming success to make up for the company's other failures. With the average cost of creating a game increasing, it's that much more important that losses are minimized. That's not getting into opportunity costs in which it would be better use of company resources if a developer made several small games with a low break even points rather slog away years on a game that ends up merely selling decently. There is always that temptation that leads a company into believing that they just need to make the next GTA or Halo and they are set.

These days, a lot of developers invest heavily in the first game in a new franchise. If the game is a huge success, subsequent games are less of a risk because of lower developed due to shared technology and the franchise gaining popularity. EA's games have failed to be that Assassin's Creed or Gears of War level hit. While Mirror's Edge 2 could reinvent the franchise, I can't see Army of Two or Bad Company suddenly under going growth or even coming close to the success of the leaders in each game's genre. The typical sales direction for a sequel is typically downward.
Ye, that is true as you say, but when a sequel to a game is comming, doesnt this indicate that the first game in the franchice sold good enough? The games doesnt necessarily have to sell like Assassin's Creed or Gears of War to make money, although i am sure that every company wants their game to sell like Assassin's Creed and Gears of War did :)

But would EA make for example Mirrors Edge 2 if Mirrors Edge 1 didnt make them any money? Or would they still make Mirrors Edge 2 in a hope to reinvent the franchise as you say?


Johann said:
As mention before, EA had prepared for the 360 and PS3 becoming the dominate console in the industry. Their R&D was in the neighborhood of over half a billion dollars. They have failed to establish their next-gen new IPs and previously strong series, such as Medal of Honor, has failed to stand up to the competition. A lot of the money they invested hasn't translated to significant or consistent success or growth in the HD front.
Ah ok, that is quite some money used on R&D indeed. But does this money counts for the last year's losses for EA? Or does these half a billion dollars count for losses from previous years? The Xbox 360 and the PS3 are now about 3 years old.


Johann said:
EA's acquisition of Pandemic and Bioware cost the company over $800 million ($860 million IIRC). Most of that was in cash. The Bioware had deals with Microsoft and Sega at the time and were at the tail-end of development for them. In face of talk of overpaying, EA said the acquisition was a long term project for diversifying the company portfolio. It remains to be seen if Saboteur and Dragon Age will be successful.

The whole Take-2 bid was just humiliating. EA obviously wanted control over the GTA franchise. They continued to delay the deadline when Take Two didn't budge. Take-Two had good news in the form of GTA4 over-performing (both Take 2 and EA's expectations) and other bits of positive news, such as the Bioshock movie deal.

The whole event cost the company about $21 million in various legal fees, which is a significant amount of the overall $300 million loss they company would later reveal in its reports. EA's stock (and Take 2's stock as well) declined following the incident.
Ah ok, here it seems that EA had alot of expenices, especially with the 860 million dollars buy of Pandemic and Bioware. I guess that this could be one of the main reasons why EA had a loss of 1 billion dollars in total?



donny2112 said:
In case you missed the reference, those are EA's own words to describe their performance this generation. They recognized that not putting more push behind the market leader had limited their audience and directly led to their reduced profitability this generation. It was part of what led them to increase their Wii output this fiscal year.
Ah ok, i cant recall that i have heard that EA said that, so i must have missed that reference. Or now that you mention it, maybe i can vaguely remember something about it. I hope that EA will have a good success when they increse their Wii output :)
 
Stormbringer said:
Marvelous Entertainment (results and forecasts from their investors meeting, broken down by platform) ->

But beforehand, a few precisions :

-1st column : number of titles/SKUs
-2nd column : share of titles (%)
-3rd column : shipments numbers
-4th column : share of shipments (%)
- the right half of the spreadsheet makes the comparison between the fiscal year in question and the previous one.
- 国内 : Japan, RSG : Rising Star Games, MEU : Marvelous USA.



FY 09 results :

1553544-2.png



Domestic forecasts for FY 10 :

465644-1.png



Overseas forecasts for FY 10 :

54563476.png

Thanks storm!

Let me see if I can figure out some of the titles.

Seems like for the forcast for FY2010, four out of the six Wii retail games are:

Arc Rise Fantasia
Little King Story
Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga
No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle

But nada after those, so we could have two secret titles still to be unveiled!

My guess, is that River King game, and possibly another Harvest Moon.

The two WiiWare games are Discipline and Reel Fishing/Fish Eyes Challenge.

PS3 and 360 is obviously Rainy Woods and that second game mentioned in April (how can I forget that thread...).

For NA, Seems like XSEED's not localizing Discipline this year, figures as we haven't even seen the game since TGS!

XSEED's PSP game is of course Half-Minute Hero/Yuusha30.

XSEED's DS game is Flower Sun & Rain.

Obvsiously the PS360 game is Rainy Woods.

The Wii games should be...

Little King Story in July
Valhalla Knights in I think I saw it for September.
Arc Rise Fantasia for February. :(

But the fourth... was that Muramasa at the time of printing if this was before the change?

Or one of the two secret FY2010 games is something big that XSEED will bring over?

It ain't NMH2, Ubisoft must've got the deal well before printing, I don't know if they'd include it before or not....

That's all I can come up with for now.

Edit: Whoops. I was thinking that the FY2010 forecast started as of the posting of that data.

Yeah, I remembered the FY begins on April 1st, thus the two "mystery Wii games" were Muramasa (April 3rd) and Reel Fishing: Angler's Dream/Fish Eyes Wii (April 30th).

But neither are by XSEED, unless as I questioned before, if as of printing, XSEED was still to be bringing over Muramasa. That news broke at the beginning of May right?
 

vanguardian1

poor, homeless and tasteless
Kenka said:
WTH, nobody's interested in those figures ?

I'm interested, but I can't check it out at the moment.

That and it's 4:02am here in eastern USA, so I presume only the euppers
that's not derogatory, is it?
would be interested right now. :)
 

CiSTM

Banned
LuCkymoON said:
Are Wii thirdparty sales really that bad???

Wii/DS will be savior for many companies in the near future. They just have to make good casual games and they will be swimming in money. Ubi did it with Imagine/PetZ series, EA is getting started with Wii Activity series, Bandai Namco is printing money with We Ski and Active Life Outdoor Challenge. Fitness games will be soon big as Music games !
 

jcm

Member
They must have done a nice jobs with cost reductions. Revenue is actually down $2M, and income is up $153M.
 
Captain Smoker said:
source: http://investor.ea.com/results.cfm



Overview (FY3 2009)
Code:
Company			Original Profit/Loss	Average Ex. Rate	Profit/Loss in US $

Nintendo		¥ 279,089,000,000	100.52378		$ 2,776,348,044	
Bandai Namco		¥ 11,830,000,000	100.52378		$ 117,683,597	
Konami			¥ 10,874,000,000	100.52378		$ 108,173,409
Ubisoft			€ 68,800,000		1.42447			$ 98,003,536
Take 2			$ 84,600,000		1			$ 84,600,000
Capcom			¥ 8,063,000,000		100.52378		$ 80,209,877
Activision Bliz.	$ 68,015,000		1			$ 68,015,000
Square Enix		¥ 6,333,000,000		100.52378		$ 63,000,019	
Hudson			¥ 1,742,000,000		100.52378		$ 17,329,233	
Takara Tomy		¥ 1,377,000,000		100.52378		$ 13,698,251	
Eizo Nanao		¥ 682,000,000		100.52378		$ 6,784,464	
Koei			¥ 25,000,000		100.52378		$ 248,697	
Nippon Ichi		¥ - 65,000,000		100.52378		$ - 646,613
AQ Interactive		¥ - 468,000,000		100.52378		$ - 4,655,615
Marvelous		¥ - 1,221,000,000	100.52378		$ - 12,146,380	
D3			¥ - 2,304,000,000	100.52378		$ - 22,919,950	
Sega Sammy		¥ - 22,882,000,000	100.52378		$ - 227,627,732	
THQ			$ - 431,112,000		1			$ - 431,112,000
SCE			¥ - 58,500,000,000	100.52378		$ - 581,951,853
Electronic Arts		$ - 1,088,000,000	1			$ - 1,088,000,000
SCE: Operating Income

All Other: Net Income
EA is getting killed. Perhaps they screwed up big time by not developing sports games for Wii & PC right away IMO (and don't tell me they've been doing that because the last 3-4 years of their PC/Wii titles have been ports from the PS2 version and not the 360/PS3 version).
 
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