A Wall Streeter's Look at the Console Wars

The blog Information Arbitrage bills itself as "A Wall Streeter's Ride into the Wild, Wild Web." Certainly the recent entries, which seem to mostly concern stock buybacks and bond financing, would seem to indicate that we are not dealing with a game fanboy here. So it is with little apprehension that I link you to the most recent post, a piece of epic length titled "Update on Sony, EA, and Nintendo -- The Internet Got It Right." It contains lots of commentary on such gems as this back-and-forth between Newsweek's N'Gai Croal and EA's Larry Probst:

__Croal: __But as long as PS3 remains supply constrained, and as long as Xbox 360 demand is falling short of
Microsoft's projections, that leaves Nintendo's Wii as the only platform that has both high supply and high demand. Yet the bulk of
EA's AAA titles are oriented towards the PS3 and the 360. How have you adjusted your development plans in light of where things stand right now?

__Probst: __We have two titles at launch for the Wii.
We will have five or six in the market by the end of our fiscal year
[March 31, 2007.] We have a number in the low to mid-teens planned for
[the next] fiscal year. I think we're going to catch up pretty quickly in terms of a broader portfolio on that platform.

Uh, and why exactly does Larry think EA is going to catch up quickly? BECAUSE
THEY'RE GOING TO HAVE TO OR GET THEIR FACE RIPPED OFF, i.e., miss earnings and revenue targets off the back of their dependence on the
PS2/PS3/Xbox 360 platforms. So in the absence of a sound organic strategy what do we do - buy someone, of course!

It goes on. It's all very entertaining.

Information Arbitrage