EA Financials Round-Up News

EA has published its financial results for the fourth fiscal quarter as well as consolidated figures for the entire financial year and is reporting a net loss of over $1 billion (£723 million) for the year.

This loss more than doubles the shortfall of EA's financial figures for the whole of last year, which reported a $454 million (£282 million) loss, although the company's Q4 losses were down by $52 million (£35 million) over the same period last year.

EA's improved performance in the fourth quarter period can, in part, be put down to the solid sales figures for Skate 2 and Lord of the Rings Conquest, which both sold over 1 million units worldwide following their releases in fiscal Q4.

The Redwood Shores based publisher also reported impressive year-long sales for its Madden 09, FIFA 09, and Need For Speed: Undercover games, which all kept their respective franchises alive with 5 million unit sales each. Additionally, Spore has performed well as a new IP, pulling in 2 million sales since its release last September.

In the post-earnings report conference call, EA dropped a few titbits of information including the announcement of two new online subscription based services that are planned for release later this year, although EA wasn't revealing any details at this point.

"We did not identify the two subscription services and we think they are consumer propositions first and we want to use the best possible public relations to bring those to market in a way that will benefit the titles," said John Riccitello, EA's CEO (via a Seeking Alpha transcription). "We will certainly be communicating what they are on or around the next call, so it's not a deep dark secret -- it's just sort of managing our marketing the best we know how."

EA also identified the PC platform as one of its major targets for the company's future marketing strategy, suggesting that there are over 1 billion PCs in the world that could be utilised for the distribution of games.

"Very rapidly, the PC is becoming the largest gaming platform in the world -- just not in a packaged good format," EA's COO, John Pleasants, clarified. "And as you look at what that means in terms of distribution of product, we think it's incredibly exciting because it's going to open up the market to new demographics, new countries, and new types of game play . . . we've been investing in that for years now and this is the year where we turn to profitability and start putting the pedal down, so we remain aggressive and bullish in that area."

In other PC related news from EA's financials, the publisher stated that it had released more PC games than any other platform in 2009. A total of 32 titles were released for PC by the publisher in 2009, while the Xbox 360 followed close behind with 26 SKUs.

Finally, EA also announced its intention to launch 30 games on Apple's iPhone in future, while noting that it now sees the device as a bona fide handheld platform. The publisher also announced that it now has 300,000 subscribers to its Warhammer Online MMORPG.