Why I stopped buying your games

Dear EA Sports,

Although I'm fairly certain you do not make these figures public, a quick look at the overall engagement with your sports brands online makes for a dire read, and a strong indicator that your churn rate over the last 5 years is more than likely problematic. Stretching to 10y must show a catastrophic model.

Your marketing people are certainly aware of this situation, and possibly have put in more overtime than your artistic dept at crunch time to figure out ways to offset this trend with revenue boosting micro-transactions. And, from the looks of it, making some kind of financial derivative deal with both the NHL and NBC-Uni or Sports Group to shore up dev costs against talk of dropping the franchise.

So, having worked with a NHL rights-holder for over a decade, I'll make an educated guess that you're sitting on 2 to 5 years of dev cost abatement for the NHL franchise and you're using that dumb money hedge to push most of your investment into growing and maintaining a one-size-fits-all electronic marketplace for the whole umbrella of sports products you carry.

Hey, I get it, with options and bonuses tied to stock price, IP-based cashflow cows are safe and churn rate gets buried fast with the value proposition of trading a few years of harmful brand image to build casinos in the desert; after all, the IP is still good, when it gets real bad, throw some money at it and everything's fine, right?

The fundamental problem with this approach -- which spreads across the industry, really -- is that you are actively killing your market. Whether you like it or not, gaming cies are essentially manufacturers, albeit in a special kind of market, but you certainly are not investment banks. This whole industry is using IPs like Lehman Brothers used mortgages. If you really think about it, you are exposing yourselves to the same rationalized insane risks as those people that layered so many CDOs and ended up having to get in the junk debentures biz to keep going. Buying studios for IP, stacking debt and stock options against unstable cashflow models built on products of degrading quality and engagement from customers that you wilfully neglect, in a field with a steadily diversifying output delivery platform ecosystem... It's insane.

Your games are bad because of this core defect in your business mentality. Every EA Sports game I have purchased in the last 10 years was on the secondary market. Why pay full price for the privilege of paying more money to play online? Within a few weeks of release date, your sport franchises drop up to 40% in resale price.

If we had to learn one thing from 2008, it's that leveraged annuities do not fare well after a couple negative quarters. If real estate was able to dip that violently, IP assets could get real messy if Disney keeps slipping.

Maybe you could just make games the way you used to: with enthusiasm for pushing boundaries, with attention to detail. As crazy as it sounds, customer loyalty is actually good for business. You need to decide if the A in EA stands for Arts or Assets.