Quarterly numbers are always confusing. For one thing, companies make up when their fiscal quarters are. For Electronic Arts (EA), 2008 ended back in April, I think. :P
Not terribly confusing is that Sony made some money ($51 million) on the PS3 for the quarter. When your money losing console sales only increase .86 million (more than doubling the .7 million they sold last year) and your money gaining software sales go up 18.1 million (almost four times the 4.7 million they sold last year), it stands to reason you'll do better financially.
But EA says they made most of their Q1 money on PS3, second most on PC, and third most on 360. WTF? Are they only counting the expense of porting the game against the PS3 profits while the 360 versions have to account for the actual development costs? Checking over the June, May, and April NPDs, I don't see any EA published PS3 games in the top ten. Maybe they're doing very well on PS3 further down the chart. Or maybe the dollar is so weak that Sony's lead in Europe combined with EA's soccer games is making the NPDs irrelevant. That might also explain the PC numbers as I think Europe is still big on PCs. Regardless, I'd love to see these numbers further broken down.
For once in my life, I feel a little bad for Microsoft. They seem to have worked really hard to dominate the US just as the dollar went in the toilet. Sucks to be them. And us, I guess. :P
Update July 30 2008 02:19
It's worth nothing the actual numbers. EA made 139 million off the PS3, 86 million from PC, and 81 million from 360. We're not talking about narrow margins here. EA is selling way more on PS3 than other platforms.
Update July 30 2008 02:54
Okay. I'm still confused, but maybe this is starting to make sense. There's something called "GAAP revenues". That's what the aforementioned figures are. According to some of posts I'm seeing on NeoGaf (always the place to go if you want to see fanatics fight it out), there's some weirdness around how these numbers are generated that makes them highly suspect. Fanatics on both sides will have lots to say, but for my part, these numbers are probably irrelevant unless someone on 1UP Yours says otherwise. :)
1 comment:
Ahh, good-ol GAAP. I don't know for sure, and I can't be bother to actually look anything up, but GAAP came into prominence after the whole ENRON debacle. Yet it actually made it easier for companies to hide their money and shuffle it around. Is it any wonder that after Carly started using GAAP number to report earnings HP stopped dishing out bonuses?
"I'm sorry, as a company we didn't really make any money ... see here are the GAAP numbers that prove it. Would you look at me when I am talking to you. You seem to be very distracted by that large pile of cash in the bank over there. It has nothing to do with us, I assure you. We really didn't make $1 billion in profits this quarter if you really look at the numbers."
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