EA Lowers 2009 Outlook

Electronic Arts has announced that it is lowering its financial expectations for the holiday quarter. EA will be responding to the current economic downturn with aggressive cost cutting measures throughout the company. EA Sports titles and a few of EA's exciting new franchises such as Dead Space, Spore and EA Mythic's Warhammer Online have been some of the higher performers this year, but their developers will still be affected with staffing reductions and/or game cancellations over the coming months. This could be in addition to the 6% staff reduction that the company announced in October. GameSpot has some additional details based on a conference call held yesterday. During bumpy economic times, video games tend to be one of the more resilient industries, so we hope their recovery is quick and relatively painless.

Mr. Riccitiello added, “While we are cutting costs, we remain committed to investing in great game quality, in new properties and in our direct-to-consumer initiatives. We will be launching several new titles and online games in fiscal 2010.”