EA Learns Lesson From Rough Holiday '08, Will Spread Out Releases This Fiscal Year

Image via CrunchBase

Did anyone else find this odd?

"One of the learnings we had from FY09 was that we bunched up too much into the Q3 quarter (October-December). Where some of our titles crowded out the competition, they were crowded out by other EA titles."

How long has EA been around and just now they learned the lesson that you can't release all of your products at Christmastime and expect them to sell well? Is there any industry where you can do that and the result is different?

As an EA stockholder, I'm worried.  What other lessons don't they know?  Spit into the wind? Bird in the hand? Two wrongs don't make a right? I could go on.

I'm not selling my stock yet, but I don't have high hopes for it. 

Mac

Update:  9:30

In another interview, this one at Industry Gamers, the EA CEO had this to say:

He also noted that recent delays for some big holiday titles have made the usually crazy calendar Q4 "less competitive," which he feels is a "good opportunity" for EA. Riccitiello added that EA plans to allocate additional marketing dollars for certain titles to better position them, and EA is "making cost cuts in other parts of the business to fund these initiatives."

So lets have a little talk about learned lessons.  It sounds like he's so happy to see that this Christmas will be "less competitive" which means he'll make sure there are plenty of EA titles that hit at Christmas time...  wait, didn't we just go through this?

By my count, that "lesson" lasted about 20 minutes before it went out the window.  I feel like I'm sitting front row at a Gallagher concert.

Mac