SCi Reports £30 Million Loses News
Gwynne Dixon
27/09/2007
SCi Games has announced that it has incurred significant loses for the financial year ending June 30th...
SCi Games, who own Britain's biggest games publisher Eidos, has announced losses of £30 million for the financial year ending June 30th. This compares to a profit of £8million for the previous year. The company also suffered a £35.1 million revenue drop this year from their 2005/06 results.
SCi pointed to drops in the retail prices of games on previous generation consoles such as the PlayStation 2 (which were related to £14.5 million in 'exceptionally high price protection charges'), and difficulties in making the jump from previous to next-gen formats (that they accounted for with £13.8 million of 'capitalised development costs'), as reasons for the loses they have incurred over the previous year. SCi added that a reduction in the PlayStation 3's retail price would ease the difficulties that the company is experiencing.
However, SCi noted that the previous financial year had seen large scale investment that will provide benefits in future, pointing to upcoming releases that will expand their Nintendo Wii and DS catalogue of games, as well as titles featuring Warner Bros. licenses such as Batman and Looney Tunes.
Jane Cavanagh, the Chief Executive of SCi, said: "The investment in our business over the past twelve months gives us a strong product pipeline for financial year 2008 and well into 2010. Our publishing business is planning 13 core game new releases on over 34 SKU in the next 12 months compared to 10 core game new releases in FY07. We are also scheduled to more than double the number of games launched by our New Media and Casual Games groups."
SCi also revealed that there have been further offers for a possible buy-out of the company following the original offer they revealed in early September. This follows a report by The Times earlier this week which cited Time Warner, Ubisoft and an undisclosed Chinese company as possible suitors for a deal.