EA Worldwide Studios Announced, Brings Together EA Mobile, Maxis, and BioWare

I don't know. I'm not the biggest MMO fan to begin with, but it was pretty solid at the time (Camelot, I mean). I think Blizzard made a lot of people irrelevant, despite their best efforts.

Either way though, it's not a good sign to shackle Bioware to these corpses.

so there not spelling it out in case they decide to change their minds later on and reverse it without having egg on their face if it doesn't work as planned, you don't have to spell everything out for the pretext to exist, indeed what they don't say (this will just mean a change of chief executive but no change in direction or goals) actually speaks far more about intentions in that regards /

Dear Santa...

Wish i could fire you...

My impression is that this means very little, it's just a structural thing EA is doing at the upper management level.

EA's strategy for DAI seems to have been to just let Bioware do their thing on the development side, and it paid off for them by all appearances, so I suspect they will continue to do so.

I agree also, unless Ryan asks one of those VP questions, like, what is Bioware doing to support our mobile strategy? That could result in a distracting scramble.

Those people have subjected their ideas to insufficient scrutiny.

I dislike the people who misuse it.

Lacking another label, I'm not sure what else to use.

they don't normally start lowering the retail price until the games hit breakeven point, so by my reckoning it had managed that by the time the GOTY version was released /

so because rockstar likes to price gouge all publishers should follow suit ?

EA despite their reputation has been actively lowering prices as soon as games hit targeted profit point, and whilst actual game sales might not be that high there making the money through product partnerships, for the 1.5 million day one sales of ME in NA they sold 100k game related items like shirts /hats/keyrings/posters/models etc things that cost pennies to make but sell for 90% profit, sales which have helped them make those targets in days (one game allegedly made its target amount before it was even released through such sales) so a lower number of game sales can achieve higher overall revenues, they worked out that it costs them roughly 40 million to make and market a game, they sell between 1 and 1.5 million copies (day 1 na sales) for $45, they hit break even on costs (when you account for distribution costs and are including capital repayments and interest payments to the investors) which is the holy grail, then its all about meeting profit requirements for future project funding and share dividends, once you do that you lower the price and everything following it is just gravy,  EA also likes to keep its portfolio with regular major title releases (games that will turn a good profit) scheduled for each quarter to keep those profits rolling, whilst other companies prefer to run one major release every couple of years with a stream of trash in between being funded by it so they cant afford to lower there product priceing on those major games... that then allows them to put more into the next project (based on expected returns) without needing to hike the price too much, some games like bf4 didn't make the expected grade so the followup had an eye watering release price of over $100 to make up for the shortfall of production costs for the series and yet they are still making another one, but even so they still dropped the price once it made the sales required.....

Nonetheless, EA's CFO raved about the success of the game in their quarterly earnings call, citing its beating their expectations for it as a primary driver behind the company as a whole beating its expectations for the quarter.