When you acquire a business you have to add value to them (unless you get a really great deal, in which case its easy)
indeed. this is _the_ problem with EA. it grows to grow. it is engaged in an arms race against itself. EA is a great example of how vicious the winner's curse can be when buying software firms because you're basically betting against the managers/owners of the company you're buying that you think their company is more valuable than they do.
the screwed up nature of this is obvious when you compare EA to activision. activision really is COD, Blizzard (but primarily WoW), and a bare handful of other studios and properties (few of which interest me, but I recognize that a lot of them are popular moneymakers or were recently, i.e. guitar hero, tony hawk, skylanders). They have a very narrow business focusing on traditional retail games and WoW. They're a lot like nintendo in the simplicity of their model. (sell cheap hardware on which to play the same mario and pokemon games over and over) and bethesda (sell elder scrolls games over and over, and when you branch out, make the game just like elder scrolls but use another known brand) and valve (as far as I can tell, the only valve original property is half-life. and all the new properties they launch start out cheap and then ramp up for sequels or are based on existing user-mods with known fanbases)
By comparison, EA is the complete opposite. Rather than trying a lot of cheap things, waiting for success, and then building on the successful ones, EA throws tons of money at projects in their infancy in the vain belief that they can pick winners. This model has largely failed in trying to replicate the success of COD and WoW, and I expect it will continue to fail. This model may work quite well if the only barometer is creating good games, but it's a joke of a business plan because it's so expensive and so dependent on big hits. This chasing winners phenomenon is the same thing that is killing THQ and that killed Copernicus. Putting big bets on expensive new IP is an awful idea.
EA is a shining success in the areas where they follow the activision model: EASports, Maxis, their non-TOR bioware games, and their racing franchises. (i would also say battlefield, but I don't know how much they over-advertise those games in the hope that they'll be COD) I don't know what to make of the Popcap and Playfish acquisitions because I don't play those games, but I could see those being strong acquisitions for the company for the same reasons.
