Holiday 2008 was one of the worst holiday seasons in EA's history with most of its major titles underperforming. EA CEO John Riccitiello believes he'd figured out the reasons behind that and devised a plan to avoid its repetition.
Holiday 2008 "was a very difficult retail environment," Riccitiello said in an earnings call before noting that EA released new titles "right on top of some very strong competitive launches."
"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," he explained.
"A year ago, when we had one major release in FYQ4 -- we [now] have four major releases in Q4 (January-March). We really put together a plan that is designed to take advantage of the fact that there are 12 months in a year, and we think we can actually do better with our key titles by spacing them out."
