You were right. Following reports of disappointing holiday sales, Electronic Arts announced cutbacks in their quarterly conference call on December 9th.
EA CEO John Riccitiello announced a ’3 prong’ attack in order to boost income in fiscal 2009 – less games, focus on games with strong online and ongoing content, and reducing expenses (i.e. laying people off).
Anyone who looked at the release calendar for Oct/Nov/Dec and didn’t see this coming needs their eyes checked. There is such a thing as too many games, and I think we saw it in quarter 4 of 2008.
Read Giant Bomb and Joystiq for more.
One more thing – sports titles will remain untouched. So Madden 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, etc. are all safe.
Doesn’t surprise me. I can’t imagine how much money they lost on the failure of Spore.
Whew, I was afraid we would only get a downloadable roster update for our sports titles next year.
Sucks this has to happen when EA actually released a few games I enjoyed. Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge were cool new IP’s. Now EA won’t release anything new or unique in a while, as they try to milk established, sucessful franchises.
Hell, Dead Space is my GOTY. Shame.