EA Reportedly up for Sale

Interesting if true. A 37% drop in share value is a serious thing in today's market as it lowers the attractiveness for new investors considerably.

I suspect that this is a symptom of the change occurring in the marketplace as more boxed software makers fail to produce enough new product in a timely fashion to compete with the Apps stores.

Most of the quick and dirty games/apps that run on smart phones, tablets, etc. are often day flies, but if they sell over the traditional products, they will drive the old timers out. This is the same with diluted currency. It is a fact of the monetary paradigm that a bad currency drives out a good. This is why the govenments are so concerned with counterfeiters.

In a way, I feel sorry for the EA board. I am sure they are doing their level best to keep the current shareholders on board and happy, but the market is shifting very fast. It may well be that the smart phone will kill the PC market the same way that the PC killed the medium main frame computer business. If so, the dislocation will be hard lines on the old games makers.

Didn't EA rank as the worst company in the USA in 2011?

Many gamers have lost faith in EA, and it appears shareholders are as well.

when they have the disposable, patch, 'all graphics no substance' approach to gaming it's their own fault.

It's not just EA... All game companies have sales down this year.

Here are some other articles...

Gamestop has lost sales...

http://www.homemediamagazine.com/gamestop/gamestop-profit-sales-down-28094

Yahoo Finance reports...

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/video-game-sales-down-july-134438388.html

Huff Post...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/12/video-game-sales_n_1669771.html

Forbes.com

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/05/11/video-game-sales-down-42-in-april-due-to-lack-of-new-releases-aging-consoles/

If EA isn't making very many good games, then that concerns investors if they will get a proper return on their investment. If your a public company, you have to show that you know how to make a buck. Either way, I think Microsoft should gobble up EA.

If EA isn't making very many good games, then that concerns investors if they will get a proper return on their investment. If your a public company, you have to show that you know how to make a buck. Either way, I think Microsoft should gobble up EA.

May the good lord save us from such a travesty. Microsoft needs to get totally out of the applications game and stick to making an operating system, if they ever learn how.

All those sidelines are a drag on the company's creativity. Of course without the application systems revenue the company would probably go broke. Not a real calamity.

Well, the can only lead to good things so not bad news at all

^ ^

though the tyrant may be falling this copuld mean even worse for other companies, im not in to economics so i dont know much, but i do know that this is not a good sign

From one greedy group of shareholders to the next. I could see change with a change of management at EA not a change of owners!!.

Ever been a shareholder? Believe me, all you are interested in is growth, dividends and safeguarding your investment.

While the proper motto of any company is "Doing well while doing good" you have to remember that the "good" is the good of the owners (shareholders). The shareholders generally have the power to fire the directors and sometimes even the executive, so stock performance on public companies is the be all and end all in the boardroom.

Greed is the general philosophy of our business world.

I find this curious, this to me indicates not only a decline in traditional PC and console gaming revenues, but also that EA's ventures into Mobile and Social gaming have ultimately been failures. I suppose if this is the situation we may see EA shed some of it's less profitable franchises and studios either to avoid a sale or to make the company profitable for the new owners. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

ITS BEACUSE OF SIMCITY 5!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

if PC gaming goes away and it's all on mobile devices I'll find a new hobby. I'm not going from a large screen to a small one.

ITS BEACUSE OF SIMCITY 5!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah, sure... ¬-¬

But seriously, I don't find strange that EA's shares fell so much, some of the recent decisions made by this company have ended in a utter failure, the new SimCity aside, as there are much better examples.

Maybe if they didn't spend years building games with complex online crap that no one wanted (SC5 anyone?) then maybe they'd keep costs down!

Go back to making cheap and quick (relatively speaking) offline games - despite what EA reps might think, online everything is NOT the future.

Besides people who by those silly little app games aren't usually real gamers anyway so I doubt thats it.

Imagine if they didn't cancel the sequel to The Simpsons Game. Would they have made more money, lost more, broken even or wouldn't it make any difference?

EA for sale?

I think I have $20 I could buy them with... though that might be too much.

EA is always up for sale, that's one of the things with it being a Publicly Traded company.

Main issue here is probably more that majority shareholders may be jumping ship. Considering that their investments are going backwards and they have no incentive to keep those shares (From what I've been able to find, EA has never paid dividends to shareholders) combined with EA's inability to see fault with its actions (Recent shareholder meeting had Ritticello say that it was the share market's fault, not EA's, that the price was low), there's probably a good incentive to jump.

Their share price has been dropping ever since it peaked back in '08 (I think, may have been '07) and last time I checked (About a fortnight ago), was back to the price it was back in October 1999.

I just imagine though what I could do with a company like EA - to make it a true "gamers' company"... I mean they aren't far off - they have their hands in most markets/genre/platform.... but they are evil and they suck. I would remove said evil and the suckiness.

My God....this must be the happiest news I have ever heard in years

All I am asking for is some change to ways developers and publishers think...and how they should NOT make games. Could changes be made with EA's downfall ? Can we expect better quality gaming and more priority to fans and customers? I don't know for sure if it is customers' regression that brought this company downhill, but I really hope it is.

I feel like the new Simcity is gonna be the decisive product for this speculation...