Electronic Arts (EA), the company with the lock on the popular Madden franchise, is booking half of its revenue for online gaming. I’m surprised they aren’t booking more. Online gaming is the future and if I owned a game company we would put more like 75% of our apples in online gaming. Our company would make sure we were taking advantage of the opportunities on Xbox Live Arcade (how many titles does EA sell there?) as well as the sparsely populated Playstation Store.

While they might have the NFL license wrapped up, EA shouldn’t be banking too much on Madden. Madden 07 didn’t have significant improvements over prior years, hopefully Madden 2008 due out this August does. One of the most anticipated EA games Spore [see Spore raw video footage in this past post] by the Sims creator Will Wright might not be released until fiscal year 2009, which sent negative energy toward EA stock.

“Spore explains a lot of it,” Pachter said of the company’s fiscal 2008 forecast miss. EA’s investment in online games explains the rest, he added.

I’m not sure if the “investment in online games” part is perceived as bad or good by this article(?) If it’s bad, then I guess if my fictional games company was public, I’d be taking a hit for focusing more resources and energy on online titles. I’m particularly interested in co-op titles because I think it encourages gamers to work together.

When it comes to buying games for the console systems it’s a big plus for those with online gaming options over those that don’t have online play. Even something as small as sharing leaderboard scores is better than nothing.

What games are on EA’s table?
A new Simpsons game to go along with the movie release this summer and a Harry Potter game. The Simpsons games to date have been eithe really bad or ok, there hasn’t been a really good Simpsons game. I haven’t played any Harry Potter games (are there any?), so will leave that to the comment area. As mentioned above, I’m less excited about another yearly Madden title, even though it’s the best football game out there. I suppose there is only so much they can do with football, but, well … it is starting to feel like a yearly money grab title to me. Any other gamers feel the same way?

I continue to look forward to Spore. It seems like a limitless game, but with less tedium than The Sims. I hope EA has thought about making this cross platform and not only a PC game.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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