EA financial report: WAR did great, layoffs happening anyway

EA released its quarterly financial statements (PDF warning on both that and the Source link) yesterday, and while the typical MMO player will not care about most of the data present, we thought a couple things buried in there were worth mentioning. First of all, EA bragged about the previously-revealed 800,000 subscriber number for Warhammer Online. Madden NFL 09 and Spore also did quite well, but despite those successes, the company still posted a net loss of $310 million.

Possibly as a result, it announced a "cost reduction plan" (doublespeak, anyone?) "which will include the elimination of approximately 6% of the Company's workforce," which Scott Jennings suggests is around 540 people. No details were given about which teams would lose people. We suppose new intellectual properties like Dead Space and Mirror's Edge aren't cheap to develop, and neither is Star Wars: The Old Republic (the existence of which was proudly touted in the report), but it's striking that even amidst sales success by WAR and other titles, the company is still shedding employees.

[Via Broken Toys]

Reader Comments (9)

Even though the companies sales may be doing well, the economy is not, and that affects profit investments. Not surprising to see some layoffs, hopefully it doesn't affect us too much.

This is just an effort on the part of the EA executive management team to boost cost per share, which in turn will help boost their end-of-year bonuses. EA is all about money, decisions are driven by money and money is more important then customers and employees. What they always fail to understand is that if you put employees and customers first the money will follow.

Sorry - "earnings per share".

This is idiotic. Instead of cutting your workforce, why not find other ways to slim down your operations? This is going to hurt them (and subsequently us, the gamers) in the long run.

EA is a monster when the goverment talks about somthing too big too fail EA would proble be one of them.

Outside of the fact that gaming is about as far as you can get from a 'vital industry' if EA ever went bust there'd probably be celebrating in the streets amongst the gamer population.

Maybe they should put out games that are worth buying. Only decent title they've come up with in the last few years is WAR. Spore failed to live up to the hype, Mercs 2 was horrible, C&C Red Alert 3 doesn't look like it's worth buying, and even the latest Madden was a gigantic fumble.

EA will probably have better job security once Bioware releases their cash cow: SWTOR

Maybe EA should stop buying company's and they would have some profit.

EA financial report: WAR did great, layoffs happening anyway

Reader Comments (9)

Posted: Oct 31st 2008 9:05AM RanWitScissorz said

Posted: Oct 31st 2008 10:59AM Triskelion said

Posted: Oct 31st 2008 12:05PM Triskelion said

Posted: Oct 31st 2008 11:52AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Oct 31st 2008 2:00PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Nov 1st 2008 3:55PM wjowski said

Posted: Oct 31st 2008 3:55PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Nov 1st 2008 6:34AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Nov 1st 2008 9:11AM MrGutts said

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