Tag Archives: eric brown

EA CFO Eric Brown has said EA is now in the market for smaller buys, speaking at the Pacific Crest Technology Leadership Forum in Vail, Colorado, this week.

Talking of EA’s failed attempt to buy Take-Two this year, Brown said, “That’s a deal whose timeframe has come and long gone. We’re just not interested in a large-scale, traditional packaged-good publishing deal.”

Brown also said EA is “underweighted” in Asia relative to its global sales.

There’s more on Reuters.

EA CFO Eric Brown said in the publisher’s Q4 earnings call last night that PC is to become the dominant hardware in gaming.

He said digital game distribution nearly doubled in revenue year-over-year to $80 million, while CEO John Riccitiello said digital revenue in total had risen to $400 in the last fiscal year.

“This is a big year for us,” said Brown. “The online part of our business is growing as much as 60 percent year over year.”

“In terms of distribution, the way we look at a lot what’s happening in the future is, we’ve got probably a billion PCs out there in the world,” he continued. “Very rapidly the PC is becoming the largest gaming platform in the world, just not in a packaged-good product.”

EA reported a $1 billion loss for fiscal 2009 yesterday. Thanks, Shacknews.

EA’s Eric Brown believes that consoles currently on the market will be around for longer than previous iterations.

Speaking at the Wedbush Morgan Securities conference, Brown said that since two out of three consoles are HD-capable and can render 60 frames per second, we’re at the limit of currently-available tech.

“I myself am not quite sure where we go from here,” said Brown. “There’s just no broadly-available consumer viewing technology beyond HD. You have to be a PC technophile with an ultra high resolution monitor to get past that.”

Brown admitted that even with Wii’s less graphically-enhanced console, the innovative controls prove that “high-powered processors are increasingly less relevant” to a console’s success.

Yet, online capabilities of the PS3, Xbox 360 and innovations in digital distribution prove there is still room for continuing growth on all three platforms.

Because of this, he says we should not expect new consoles anytime soon, but more price drops for the ones already available.

“The point here is that we’ve seen one major price drop thus far in this console cycle; we feel that we have a long ways to go, and a lot more of the unit sales will occur at the lower price points,” he said.

“History holds more [hardware] units translates, times tie ratio, to more software units and software dollars for third-party publishers. Those are the key takeaways in terms of where we see this console cycle at this point in time.”

EA CFO Eric Brown confirmed in the publisher’s Q3 earnings conference call today that Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge both sold over 1 million copies each in 2008.

The figure includes sales for each port of both games, excluding the PC version of Mirror’s Edge, as it was only recently released.

No mention was made on the rumored sequels for each game, but EA bossman John Riccitiello did state that “games with a two on them sell better”.

EA confirmed it’s to continue to trim games from its release schedule in a conference call last night, but that new IP brought to market this year will go forward with sequels.

“We’re very pleased with a lot of our new franchises this year. Spore… [looks like an] ongoing franchise, Dead Space looks like a long-term big winner for us… Warhammer will continue to perform very well,” said CEO John Riccitiello.

“Mirror’s Edge was very strongly reviewed – That one’s going to go forward. We’ll be looking at some issues around the design to make sure that strong IP is married with strong business.”

CFO Eric Brown said in the call that SKU reductions would most likely be split evenly between the company’s casual titles and more traditional games, while the sports portfolio was likely to remain unaffected.

The execs were speaking to investors after issuing a Q4 sales warning last night.

Thanks Gamasutra and Shacknews.

According to this, Eric Brown is to replace Warren Jensen as EA CFO.

Brown most recently worked at McAfee and will start in his new role on April 14.

“Eric’s strong financial background, broad international experience and industry knowledge makes him a perfect fit for EA,” said CEO John Riccitiello. “Eric is a highly-regarded CFO, and we are looking forward to having him join our team.”