Once upon a time, John Riccitiello could do no wrong as CEO of Electronic Arts. All things must change. Now, Mr. Riccitiello can do no right. With high development costs and lower margins, plus no shortage of missed forecasts, Electronic Arts is suffering. Worse, EA just lowered their forecast for 2010. This represents the second straight year that EA has slashed its forecasts and this is making investors considerably unhappy…and when investors are unhappy, CEO’s are typically out of a job.

Despite the slashed forecast, analysts say EA has a solid roster of potential hit games due this year, and that its efforts toward online games and software for mobile devices like Apple Inc’s iPhone may pay off in the long run.

But they were far less forgiving of EA’s leadership under Riccitiello — the stock has declined about 70 percent during his tenure. Investors have expressed concerns that EA overpaid for social gaming concern Playfish last year and remember its failed hostile bid in 2008 for Take-Two.

Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter said the EA management team has “zero credibility” with investors, who he said have felt disregarded as EA has continued to miss its sales and earnings targets.

“Investors feel betrayed, and the comment I got most from investors today is ‘They don’t seem to care about investors.’ This management team is running out of room to underperform. I think investor tolerance is gone … they don’t get another year to turn around,” Pachter said.

Arvind Bhatia of Sterne, Agee & Leach added that the company has “consistently been underperforming,” and that there is going to be need for “some drastic action” at EA, whose high operating costs leave it with margins of 7 percent or less.

“For a $4 billion-plus company, that just isn’t acceptable,” he said. “Something is going to happen here — drastic costs cuts or them buying someone or getting sold — something has got to give in the next 12 to 18 months.”

Source

You’d have to be living under a rock not to know that it’s Turkey Day today, and you’d have to be a bit of an ass not to pause for a moment and give thanks – be it to God, Buddha, the Big Banger, your employer, Uncle Sam, friends, some persecuted pilgrims and naive natives, Satoru Iwata, indoor plumbing, or your family – for something. If you’re an American reading this blog and you only get to play on an old hand-me-down NES instead of the PS3 you’ve been coveting, or even if you do your gaming in a cardboard box under an overpass with an old Tiger Telematics handheld, you still live in the best nation on this earth with resources and providence enough to help other countries, and in the age of the microprocessor and modern medicine.

As for us, besides soapboxes and industry executives prone to putting their foot in their mouth, we’re thankful for inspired developers and loyal readers. If you’ve been with us for a while you might have seen us pop up out of nowhere with an incredibly unique web portal that rivaled the big guys, and then may have noticed as we were forced to surrender to the blog format in response to a challenging economy. During that shift we lost a lot of good men and women who were talented professionals and good friends*, many of whom personally sacrificed and stuck with us far longer than would ever be expected. We are thankful for them and the groundwork they laid that brought us to your attention and still helps to make it easier for our skeleton crew to bring you our unique brand of news and perspective.

Unfortunately the measures taken to heal the economy haven’t been very successful and neither have our inexperienced attempts to effectively monetize our traffic. Even though the remaining staff are writers (all career gaming journalists) we are now spending more and more time worrying about keeping the lights on and things like Google AdSense policy, SEO (search engine optimization), code, ad delivery platforms, hacker exploits, and wrestling with the idea of affiliate marketing. It’s a situation you might have observed by how often we’ve been able to post new articles. We’d much rather leave things like that to experts while we focus on keeping you informed, laughing, and thinking.

So if you feel like helping out in any area and have any ideas, talents, or time you’d be willing to invest, that’s something we’d be thankful for too. (You can reach us here.) In the meantime we’ll keep doing our best to make GameAlmighty (and her sister sites, InfoAddict and TechAlmighty) a place you look forward to visiting – and sharing articles from, and clicking on the ads, and telling your friends about.

Now go and kick your cousins’ ass at some splitscreen before you get called in to the kitchen to help fist the dead bird full of StoveTop or peel orange potatoes.

*It’s foolish to try and name names because I am bound to forget a few and misspell others, but Captain Almighty (yes, he is still around and likes to interfere intervene regularly) wanted to make sure that I tried anyway…

Many thanks and Happy Thanksgiving to Edward Allebest, Chris Jensen, Mike Siciliano, Matt Butrovich, Kirk Manley, the compassionate wizards at CastIron Coding, Diane Valdivia, Noelle Allebest, Kylie Kiric, Daniel Espinosa, Vy Le, Sam Solars, Chris McGuire, Matthew Morrison, Chaz Head, Luis Villarreal, Tim Graybill, Trent Kamerman & 800Kamerman, Trina Williams, Keren Kang, Phil Radke, Cheryl Cajucom, Leath Robinson, David Chapman, everyone at Reverb, Tracy Erickson, Kerry Kullbach, Kimberly Henderson, Ben Smith, Randy Saunders, Marc Gutierrez, Nick Balogh, Joe Galath, BrianHarvey, Erik Allebest, Jacob B., Eric Zapp, Jeremy Merrick, Cheryl Cajucom, Shawnee Swarengin, Joe Pasco, Humphrey Cheung, Jon Lenaway, Neil Wood, Tiffany Massey, Pamela McKraken, Joey Kelly, Joel Masters, Anthony Romero, David Bruno, and Davit Barbakadze. We appreciate all you have done to support us and cheer us on in your various roles and capacities.

It’s not a good thing, but lately we’ve been so busy that we haven’t been very consistent about making it to our inboxes before the end of the day. However, if you would like us to link to your portfolio online, you have a suggestion for our perdicament, or you just want to say “Hi”, please be patient and persistent. We would love to hear how you’re doing.

Gotta love executives. Overpaid do-nothings who sign a bunch of paperwork and reap the rewards from the sweat and toil of people who actually do all of the work. God Bless America. In this case, we have the ever-lovable Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision, who is incapable of NOT looking like an asshole in photographs. He has the kind of face you want to punch. Now that he’s $20-million richer after the sell of stock options at the height of Modern Warfare 2 mania, you just want to rear back and throw a right-hook as hard as possible. Think anyone at Infinity Ward will see that kind of money? Probably not. Least of all will be the people who actually created the game.

Gory details at Gamespot.

Back when the recession first started becoming a big deal, video game industry execs loved to crow about how their industry was virtually immune to the downturn. For awhile, they looked correct. Now, after four straight months of negative numbers, they may want to rethink their rosy outlooks.

The month of June represented the largest decline since September 2000.

I can easily make the argument that most of this decline can be blamed on the horrific lack of quality games. There is a lot of crap out there right now, derivative titles that demand a rental, but not a purchase. Of the quality games that have been released over the last four months, most of them are niche products like UFC and Fight Night, which simply don’t appeal to the larger buying audience.

From the L.A. Times:

Consumer jitters about the economy, combined with a lackluster slate of game releases, led to a 38% drop in sales of game consoles such as Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 3, Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360 and Nintendo Co.’s Wii and DS in June. Hardware sales fell to $383.6 million last month, from $617.3 million in June 2008. read more…

Well it’s about freaking time.  Ever since Electronic Arts went on a rampage several years ago and scooped up exclusivity deals with the major franchises, the sports gaming market in general has suffered terribly. With no competition to worry about, EA is perfectly content to sit back and deliver only the bare necessities, knowing full well you have no other options. It’s bad for gamers and it is bad for the industry. Competition breeds innovation. It’s the cornerstone of Capitalism, yet EA has been getting away with murder for years.

That may be changing soon, thanks to a ruling from a U.S. District Court Judge in San Francisco, who says the case can move forward, denying EA’s request to throw the lawsuit out.

From Law 360:

A judge has refused to throw out federal antitrust claims against video game maker Electronic Arts Inc. in a proposed consumer class action alleging that the company’s exclusive licenses with various football leagues have “killed off” competition for its Madden NFL series of football games.

“I’m not dead yet!”

Interplay, the video game veteran that has been around for decades, is hurtling towards oblivion…once again. In all likelihood, this will be Interplay’s final farewell, never to return. This is all according to analysis by Game Industry.biz, who poured over Interplay’s last SEC filing and discovered the company had exactly 0 dollars, which is not the amount one needs to run a typical American company, unless one is fortunate enough to get a bailout, of which Interplay has little hope.

I have mixed feelings about Interplay’s imminent demise. On the one hand, this is the company that gave us Fallout all those years ago. On the other hand, the majority of their products shipped too early and were riddled with bugs.  Yet, I’ll always have a fond memory of Battle Chess and Descent.

From Game Industry:

“We continue to seek external sources of funding,” Interplay said, “including but not limited to, incurring debt, the selling of assets or securities, licensing of certain product rights in selected territories, selected distribution agreements, and/or other strategic transactions sufficient to provide short-term funding, and achieve our long-term strategic objectives.”

Yeah, good luck with that.