John Riccitiello: EA’s profits went down due to poor PS3 sales?

With Activision recently becoming the biggest third party publisher of games, a lot of people have been asking what happened to EA. Electronic Arts“>John Riccitiello, the CEO of Electronic Arts, has given word that the company’s operating margins in its publishing business have dropped significantly from 20% to 5%.

Riccitiello says that their previous rise to the top can be attributed to the fact that EA heavily supported the PlayStation 2, which was the most popular console during its lifecycle.

However, as of now, the field is different. Riccitiello explains this in detail:

Point blank, this cycle is developing quite differently than the last cycle. The next-gen hardware build is going a little more slowly.

This time, there’s been some unexpected strength with the Wii and the PS3 hasn’t – yet – performed as well as we expected it to. That probably has a bigger impact than any other factor on our margins.

With Activision recently becoming the biggest third party publisher of games, a lot of people have been asking what happened to EA. Electronic Arts“>John Riccitiello, the CEO of Electronic Arts, has given word that the company’s operating margins in its publishing business have dropped significantly from 20% to 5%.

Riccitiello says that their previous rise to the top can be attributed to the fact that EA heavily supported the PlayStation 2, which was the most popular console during its lifecycle.

However, as of now, the field is different. Riccitiello explains this in detail:

Point blank, this cycle is developing quite differently than the last cycle. The next-gen hardware build is going a little more slowly.

This time, there’s been some unexpected strength with the Wii and the PS3 hasn’t – yet – performed as well as we expected it to. That probably has a bigger impact than any other factor on our margins.