Earlier today (yesterday?) reader-cum-tipper Aerox sent us a link to this Associated Press piece discussing EA’s second quarter earnings. Or, more specifically, EA’s second quarter losses. It seems that the gaming behemoth lost $195 million dollars during the quarter due to “how it accounts for sales of online-enabled games, now recognizing the sales on a deferred basis over an estimated service period.”
Not having easy access to their financial records — or the green visor and helpful Chinese grad students necessary to read them — I can’t definitively say this is the sort of thing a company tells its shareholders to keep them from taking up the torches and pitchforks and going all Mary Shelley on its reanimated ass, but it does seem somewhat coincidental. We’ve been hearing reports of how EA’s position as the top dog of third-party gaming has been lost to Activision for quite some time now, and if they are indeed doing even worse than we’ve been hearing, you have to imagine that EA’s offices are filled with analysts and accountants screaming and running through the halls while vainly searching for metaphorical life boats in case the metaphorical ship begins literally sinking and they somehow all drown in the middle of Northern California. I can’t imagine the shareholders would be very pleased they had invested in a company able to capsize while on dry land, so EA has probably got the spin machines spinning like young girls still amused by turning in rapid circles until they become dizzy and fall on the ground.
Then again, if my fictional scenario does come to pass, I’d like to think at least a few of the shareholders would be impressed by the pure surreality of the whole thing. At least until they realize they’ve lost tons of cash, and the laws of physics no longer apply. That sort of thing makes for a really bad weekend.
