(This guy says EA is not a digital-gaming company, and he’s right)
Electronic Arts (ERTS) is making a strong point of marketing itself to investors as a ‘digital’ gaming company.
Obviously, all video games are digital. As far as I know, there are no analog video games.
But in EA’s case, digital is used to denote sales of non-traditional games, including downloadable ones, free-to-play online games, and related services. These games are typically of the casual/social type, meaning that they’re more likely to be played by Grandma than your average 16-year old hardcore gamer.
However, I broke down the math for investors in my latest article for Minyanville.com:
The numbers tell me that EA is a non-growing traditional software publisher with a pretty decent digital business. But it’s not the digital-focused juggernaut it wants to be.
As I noted in my bullet points above, digital revenue was $268 million in Q4, or 27% of sales. For the full fiscal year, it was $833 million, or 22% of sales.
Based on guidance for fiscal 2012, that number is expected to go to $1.075 billion, or just 28% sales.
It’s good that digital is becoming a bigger part of EA’s revenues, but it’s plain to see that the company is still weighed down by its weak legacy business. The digital business is growing quickly, but it’s not pulling the entire company up along with it.
Otherwise, EA would be forecasting something stronger than a 0.6% revenue increase for this year.
And oh yeah, I’m not a fan of ERTS as a stock. As if that wasn’t obvious…
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