[pietasterp]

The thing is, we look at this stuff as consumers/gamers, and we hope that EA makes moves towards becoming a company that makes great games again because that's what we (justifiably) care about. And I agree that if they do that, it could be a path back to profitability.

The problem is, from the perspective of the only people that EA really cares about - the shareholders - EA might as well be selling CD's (dating myself), boxes of candy, cardboard boxes, or whatever widget commodity you want to imagine. It's a natural business cycle; when a company gets really big, they get homogenized and whatever else they used to do or be, they just become "Big Corporation X" at a certain scale. They begin to care about doing business, not about doing whatever it was that got them to that position in the first place. And once they are publicly traded, they care only about the shareholders, who don't care about good games - they care about a profitable business model. If EA management had any reason to believe they could get their share price back up by releasing nothing but 99-cent or freemium mobile games that are essentially bite-sized 3-4 minutes experiences - say Angry Birds or some such -they would transition the whole company to that model ASAP. And they may actually have some reason to believe that may work, so look out...

Re: the NFL license, I suspect that's still a net money-maker for them, so it wouldn't make sense for them to ditch that license (depending on how future negotiations go). Although I really have no idea if that's true or not, so probably take that with a grain of salt.