<h2>GBAtemp thoughts and links 18th February 2012</h2>
Stock prices for the games companies
*If you are reading this on the portal the flash embeds might not work for you (even if you otherwise have flash)- switch to the full post to seem them or use the links you should still be able to see to get the graphs.*
<p>Over the last few weeks we have had noticed a few discussions over stock prices and financials of various companies which is great. This is not really the time or place to discuss how the stock market works in depth but in general companies sell of percentages of themselves to various people when starting up (investors and early employees mainly) and eventually they might "float" themselves on one or more of the various stock exchanges around the world (you might have previously heard of the likes of the New York Stock exchange, FTSE 100, NASDAQ and Tokyo stock exchange) with their initial public offering (IPO) being of great interest to investors (Facebook and with it some of the companies that offer games on there are in the process of doing it right now) and in doing so allowing anybody that can pay the chance to own a portion of the company (some companies will on occasion pay a portion of their profits in a process known as paying dividends but other companies will not pay (Apple being noted for it) which usually has the effect of raising their stock price at the cost of stability allowing people to potentially buy low and sell high(er)). Share prices are linked to many things including the cost of getting finance/loans, what companies will work together, bonus pay, what companies will get taken over (indeed many companies will seek to pump up their share price if they are about to get taken over) and much more with knockon effects to other companies they deal with.
It gets far more complicated and does so quite quickly though so you are invited to learn more on any of the hundreds of investment websites out there- we live in the information age so you can usually gain the sort of information people pay very large sums of money (especially in the financial world) to learn about so as to get a piece of paper saying the once passed a test on the subject (do a search for open source universities and poke around some of their economics or finance options).</p>
<p>Seeing this increase in interest in such matters we decided to compile a little list of a handful of publicly traded companies (several big players like Valve are still private companies and so fall outside this for now) and have a look at stock prices over the last week or so and try to tie in a bit of news. Now the likes of Sony and Microsoft have big holdings outside computer games and will probably have news fall outside this (we are not entirely limiting ourselves to games related stuff but we do not really care about Microsoft's latest licensing change for corporate windows) and the list of companies we follow will likely change and maybe grow over the coming editions but for now we picked a handful of companies worth following and tried to wind in a big of news. Now stocks in a perfect world would be a function of expected profit and future potential but there are a load of other things that go into determining stock price such as currency performance in their dominant market (the Japanese Yen not doing much for companies with large percentages of their income being generated overseas but equally accountants get paid very good money to figure out how to stash money overseas for various reasons including dodge issues converting currency) in addition to the hundreds of things that feed the potential profit and future potential so this is not going to be anything near an exhaustive analysis. As such our main focus points will be profit forecasts (Nintendo released a negative forecast this week causing a bit of drop in share price), game reviews (as much as we find the concept of metacritic distasteful it seems investors do not- another potential cause for disparity between what "should" be and what is), deals (in the last week Sony split from Ericsson renewing talk in the potential of a PSP function sporting mobile phone), new regulations and court cases (taxes, censorship laws- games have quite frequently failed to make it into Australia (although there do appear to be hearings so as to lessen this and maybe even stop it from happening) and in some cases Germany without cuts that some developers and/or publishers do not care to do and those are fairly large markets) and software/hardware sales (the troubles with the Vita are well documented). In light of this we wish to link this article from wikinvest (source of a good chunk of our information for today) as it summarises how more traditional investors see the computer games market/industry and will hopefully shine a bit of light as to the underlying logic or indeed apparent lack thereof. Although we would never wish to categorise the computer games world as slow other than the new financial year in Japan and some of Europe looming (with the related forecasts) and the launch of the and issues with the 3ds and vita there is not a lot going on, we do wish to note however that many companies have been slow to react to social network games and new mobile devices and as such some of this may end up being the equivalent of following engines and not looking at cars.</p>
<p>There are so many companies to pick from but to keep it lean at first we are limiting ourselves to six which are (links to their investor profiles if you click on the name). Our main focus will be their main markets that they trade in (even to the exclusion of those companies that might still see some trade in other markets by proxy) if we can.
Nintendo
Sony
Microsoft
EA
Ubisoft
Activision Blizzard
We did debates whether to normalise the value to shares limits and/or main currency but we figured differences are more important than simple visualisation.
Potential future companies to be included are (their profiles are linked and those have access to charts)
Take-Two Interactive
Konami (arguably a bigger company than ubisoft)
Square Enix
Sega
Namco Bandai
As mentioned Valve and many other companies that are never the less big players in the games world are private and so not in this but we will try to mention any investment they seek or if they do consider an IPO. Apple might also make a future appearance as they have pitched some of their devices as games consoles after a fashion.</p>
The graphs
<p>Links below each chart to more comprehensive links. Once again thanks to <a href="http://www.wikinvest.com/">Wikinvest</a> for the nice charts. Our news is kept fairly light here but in the very likely event we have missed something out you reckon is of note then do share it in the discussion below.</p>
Nintendo
<script src="http://charts.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/wikichart/javascript/scripts.php" type="text/javascript"></script><div id="wikichartContainer_C663A10B-E1F3-3981-4CAD-903CBD4B4F29"><div style="width: 390px; text-align: center; vertical-align: center; margin-top: 22px;"><a href="http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/"><img src="http://cdn.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/images/adobe_flash_logo.gif" alt="Flash" style="border-width: 0px;"/><br/>Flash Player 9 or higher is required to view the chart<br/><strong>Click here to download Flash Player now</strong></a></div></div><script type="text/javascript">if (typeof(embedWikichart) != "undefined") {embedWikichart("http://charts.wikinvest.com/WikiChartMini.swf","wikichartContainer_C663A10B-E1F3-3981-4CAD-903CBD4B4F29","390","245",{"embedCodeDate":"2012-2-18","ticker":"NTDOY","endDate":"17-02-2012","showAnnotations":"true","liveQuote":"true","startDate":"10-02-2012"},{});}</script><div style="font-size:9px;text-align:right;width:390px;font-family:Verdana"><a href="http://www.wikinvest.com/chart/NTDOY" style="text-decoration:underline; color:#0000ee;">View the full OTC:NTDOY chart</a></div>
<p>Nintendo this week saw earnings projections to make for losses (although speculation on whether it was the fairly strong Yen (now seen to be dropping to both the Euro and US Dollar resulting in a mini investment spike) or that Mario did not do as it once did) and they also saw the purchase of their long time video codec supplier mobiclip (known also by the extension vx if you are a rom hacker and earlier in life as actimagine).</p>
Sony
<script src="http://charts.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/wikichart/javascript/scripts.php" type="text/javascript"></script><div id="wikichartContainer_041E9758-82D8-AB34-73C2-906F39BB9715"><div style="width: 390px; text-align: center; vertical-align: center; margin-top: 22px;"><a href="http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/"><img src="http://cdn.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/images/adobe_flash_logo.gif" alt="Flash" style="border-width: 0px;"/><br/>Flash Player 9 or higher is required to view the chart<br/><strong>Click here to download Flash Player now</strong></a></div></div><script type="text/javascript">if (typeof(embedWikichart) != "undefined") {embedWikichart("http://charts.wikinvest.com/WikiChartMini.swf","wikichartContainer_041E9758-82D8-AB34-73C2-906F39BB9715","390","245",{"ticker":"SNE","endDate":"17-02-2012","liveQuote":"true","showAnnotations":"true","embedCodeDate":"2012-2-18","startDate":"10-02-2012"},{});}</script><div style="font-size:9px;text-align:right;width:390px;font-family:Verdana"><a href="http://www.wikinvest.com/chart/SNE" style="text-decoration:underline; color:#0000ee;">View the full NYSE:SNE chart</a></div>
<p>Sony this week saw continued fallout from their earnings projections as well as the Vita half as well as they wished (rumours of developers jumping ship, some big general goods Australian retailers not ordering much, if any, stock of it but they also saw the split of Sony Ericsson become final (and with it some nice technology they can use).</p>
Microsoft
<script src="http://charts.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/wikichart/javascript/scripts.php" type="text/javascript"></script><div id="wikichartContainer_526FA2DE-723E-1487-DC1F-903F8C98DE04"><div style="width: 390px; text-align: center; vertical-align: center; margin-top: 22px;"><a href="http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/"><img src="http://cdn.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/images/adobe_flash_logo.gif" alt="Flash" style="border-width: 0px;"/><br/>Flash Player 9 or higher is required to view the chart<br/><strong>Click here to download Flash Player now</strong></a></div></div><script type="text/javascript">if (typeof(embedWikichart) != "undefined") {embedWikichart("http://charts.wikinvest.com/WikiChartMini.swf","wikichartContainer_526FA2DE-723E-1487-DC1F-903F8C98DE04","390","245",{"ticker":"MSFT","endDate":"17-02-2012","liveQuote":"true","showAnnotations":"true","embedCodeDate":"2012-2-18","startDate":"10-02-2012"},{});}</script><div style="font-size:9px;text-align:right;width:390px;font-family:Verdana"><a href="http://www.wikinvest.com/chart/MSFT" style="text-decoration:underline; color:#0000ee;">View the full NASDAQ:MSFT chart</a></div>
<p>Trying to sort the 360 and general microsoft stuff proved difficult. A new dash was launched although nothing much that would cause a change on the stock market (not good news for those waiting to do add in the gear for the reset glitch hack though) and there were rumours of a touchscreen controller for the successor. Equally they are being called out for their less than competitive policies with respect to XBLA and indie developers compared to similar offerings from other consoles and indeed the likes of IOS, android marketplace and social networks.</p>.
EA
<script src="http://charts.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/wikichart/javascript/scripts.php" type="text/javascript"></script><div id="wikichartContainer_80889417-F173-209E-DF2F-90B4B98AB2E6"><div style="width: 390px; text-align: center; vertical-align: center; margin-top: 22px;"><a href="http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/"><img src="http://cdn.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/images/adobe_flash_logo.gif" alt="Flash" style="border-width: 0px;"/><br/>Flash Player 9 or higher is required to view the chart<br/><strong>Click here to download Flash Player now</strong></a></div></div><script type="text/javascript">if (typeof(embedWikichart) != "undefined") {embedWikichart("http://charts.wikinvest.com/WikiChartMini.swf","wikichartContainer_80889417-F173-209E-DF2F-90B4B98AB2E6","390","245",{"ticker":"EA","endDate":"17-02-2012","showAnnotations":"true","liveQuote":"true","embedCodeDate":"2012-2-18","startDate":"10-02-2012"},{});}</script><div style="font-size:9px;text-align:right;width:390px;font-family:Verdana"><a href="http://www.wikinvest.com/chart/EA" style="text-decoration:underline; color:#0000ee;">View the full NASDAQ:EA chart</a></div>
<p>Origin which is usually pitched as EA's and in general one of the big competitors to Valve's almost ubiquitous Steam platform/service took a blow when EA's own COO said it is not quite fit to be a steamkiller gamepolitics link. On the other hand EA is the publisher of The Old Republic which is continuing to expand it seems (an Australian launch is next). However it should be noted that just before this week EA was downgraded to neutral in light of poor sales and such (a fancy way of saying invest if you want but do not expect anything that good in the near future).</p>
Ubisoft
(we had trouble getting it make a five day embed link but you should be able to select it)
<script src="http://charts.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/wikichart/javascript/scripts.php" type="text/javascript"></script><div id="wikichartContainer_1153AC8C-9F5B-9EB2-632E-906D969A501C"><div style="width: 390px; text-align: center; vertical-align: center; margin-top: 22px;"><a href="http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/"><img src="http://cdn.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/images/adobe_flash_logo.gif" alt="Flash" style="border-width: 0px;"/><br/>Flash Player 9 or higher is required to view the chart<br/><strong>Click here to download Flash Player now</strong></a></div></div><script type="text/javascript">if (typeof(embedWikichart) != "undefined") {embedWikichart("http://charts.wikinvest.com/WikiChartMini.swf","wikichartContainer_1153AC8C-9F5B-9EB2-632E-906D969A501C","390","245",{"ticker":"UBI","endDate":"17-02-2012","embedCodeDate":"2012-2-18","liveQuote":"true","showAnnotations":"true","startDate":"17-01-2012"},{});}</script><div style="font-size:9px;text-align:right;width:390px;font-family:Verdana"><a href="http://www.wikinvest.com/chart/UBI" style="text-decoration:underline; color:#0000ee;">View the full EPA:UBI chart</a></div>
<p>Nothing much here other than the predictable announcment of Assassin's Creed 3 but they are coming off the back of a series of nasty DRM complaints.</p>
Activision Blizzard
<script src="http://charts.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/wikichart/javascript/scripts.php" type="text/javascript"></script><div id="wikichartContainer_9193B15F-D931-EA14-E242-904114BE866E"><div style="width: 390px; text-align: center; vertical-align: center; margin-top: 22px;"><a href="http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/"><img src="http://cdn.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/images/adobe_flash_logo.gif" alt="Flash" style="border-width: 0px;"/><br/>Flash Player 9 or higher is required to view the chart<br/><strong>Click here to download Flash Player now</strong></a></div></div><script type="text/javascript">if (typeof(embedWikichart) != "undefined") {embedWikichart("http://charts.wikinvest.com/WikiChartMini.swf","wikichartContainer_9193B15F-D931-EA14-E242-904114BE866E","390","245",{"ticker":"ATVI","endDate":"17-02-2012","liveQuote":"true","showAnnotations":"true","embedCodeDate":"2012-2-18","startDate":"10-02-2012"},{});}</script><div style="font-size:9px;text-align:right;width:390px;font-family:Verdana"><a href="http://www.wikinvest.com/chart/ATVI" style="text-decoration:underline; color:#0000ee;">View the full NASDAQ:ATVI chart</a></div>
<p>Their CEO became a member of coca cola's board but that is nothing major in business (board members often sit on several boards). The start of the week also saw a grim forecast hit various wires.</p>
Closing thoughts
<p>What would appear to be a fairly negative week (coming off a fairly negative few months) and nothing on the horizon set to cause a big reversal (equally we do not anticipate a massive drop anywhere).</p>
Stock prices for the games companies
*If you are reading this on the portal the flash embeds might not work for you (even if you otherwise have flash)- switch to the full post to seem them or use the links you should still be able to see to get the graphs.*
<p>Over the last few weeks we have had noticed a few discussions over stock prices and financials of various companies which is great. This is not really the time or place to discuss how the stock market works in depth but in general companies sell of percentages of themselves to various people when starting up (investors and early employees mainly) and eventually they might "float" themselves on one or more of the various stock exchanges around the world (you might have previously heard of the likes of the New York Stock exchange, FTSE 100, NASDAQ and Tokyo stock exchange) with their initial public offering (IPO) being of great interest to investors (Facebook and with it some of the companies that offer games on there are in the process of doing it right now) and in doing so allowing anybody that can pay the chance to own a portion of the company (some companies will on occasion pay a portion of their profits in a process known as paying dividends but other companies will not pay (Apple being noted for it) which usually has the effect of raising their stock price at the cost of stability allowing people to potentially buy low and sell high(er)). Share prices are linked to many things including the cost of getting finance/loans, what companies will work together, bonus pay, what companies will get taken over (indeed many companies will seek to pump up their share price if they are about to get taken over) and much more with knockon effects to other companies they deal with.
It gets far more complicated and does so quite quickly though so you are invited to learn more on any of the hundreds of investment websites out there- we live in the information age so you can usually gain the sort of information people pay very large sums of money (especially in the financial world) to learn about so as to get a piece of paper saying the once passed a test on the subject (do a search for open source universities and poke around some of their economics or finance options).</p>
<p>Seeing this increase in interest in such matters we decided to compile a little list of a handful of publicly traded companies (several big players like Valve are still private companies and so fall outside this for now) and have a look at stock prices over the last week or so and try to tie in a bit of news. Now the likes of Sony and Microsoft have big holdings outside computer games and will probably have news fall outside this (we are not entirely limiting ourselves to games related stuff but we do not really care about Microsoft's latest licensing change for corporate windows) and the list of companies we follow will likely change and maybe grow over the coming editions but for now we picked a handful of companies worth following and tried to wind in a big of news. Now stocks in a perfect world would be a function of expected profit and future potential but there are a load of other things that go into determining stock price such as currency performance in their dominant market (the Japanese Yen not doing much for companies with large percentages of their income being generated overseas but equally accountants get paid very good money to figure out how to stash money overseas for various reasons including dodge issues converting currency) in addition to the hundreds of things that feed the potential profit and future potential so this is not going to be anything near an exhaustive analysis. As such our main focus points will be profit forecasts (Nintendo released a negative forecast this week causing a bit of drop in share price), game reviews (as much as we find the concept of metacritic distasteful it seems investors do not- another potential cause for disparity between what "should" be and what is), deals (in the last week Sony split from Ericsson renewing talk in the potential of a PSP function sporting mobile phone), new regulations and court cases (taxes, censorship laws- games have quite frequently failed to make it into Australia (although there do appear to be hearings so as to lessen this and maybe even stop it from happening) and in some cases Germany without cuts that some developers and/or publishers do not care to do and those are fairly large markets) and software/hardware sales (the troubles with the Vita are well documented). In light of this we wish to link this article from wikinvest (source of a good chunk of our information for today) as it summarises how more traditional investors see the computer games market/industry and will hopefully shine a bit of light as to the underlying logic or indeed apparent lack thereof. Although we would never wish to categorise the computer games world as slow other than the new financial year in Japan and some of Europe looming (with the related forecasts) and the launch of the and issues with the 3ds and vita there is not a lot going on, we do wish to note however that many companies have been slow to react to social network games and new mobile devices and as such some of this may end up being the equivalent of following engines and not looking at cars.</p>
<p>There are so many companies to pick from but to keep it lean at first we are limiting ourselves to six which are (links to their investor profiles if you click on the name). Our main focus will be their main markets that they trade in (even to the exclusion of those companies that might still see some trade in other markets by proxy) if we can.
Nintendo
Sony
Microsoft
EA
Ubisoft
Activision Blizzard
We did debates whether to normalise the value to shares limits and/or main currency but we figured differences are more important than simple visualisation.
Potential future companies to be included are (their profiles are linked and those have access to charts)
Take-Two Interactive
Konami (arguably a bigger company than ubisoft)
Square Enix
Sega
Namco Bandai
As mentioned Valve and many other companies that are never the less big players in the games world are private and so not in this but we will try to mention any investment they seek or if they do consider an IPO. Apple might also make a future appearance as they have pitched some of their devices as games consoles after a fashion.</p>
The graphs
<p>Links below each chart to more comprehensive links. Once again thanks to <a href="http://www.wikinvest.com/">Wikinvest</a> for the nice charts. Our news is kept fairly light here but in the very likely event we have missed something out you reckon is of note then do share it in the discussion below.</p>
Nintendo
<script src="http://charts.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/wikichart/javascript/scripts.php" type="text/javascript"></script><div id="wikichartContainer_C663A10B-E1F3-3981-4CAD-903CBD4B4F29"><div style="width: 390px; text-align: center; vertical-align: center; margin-top: 22px;"><a href="http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/"><img src="http://cdn.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/images/adobe_flash_logo.gif" alt="Flash" style="border-width: 0px;"/><br/>Flash Player 9 or higher is required to view the chart<br/><strong>Click here to download Flash Player now</strong></a></div></div><script type="text/javascript">if (typeof(embedWikichart) != "undefined") {embedWikichart("http://charts.wikinvest.com/WikiChartMini.swf","wikichartContainer_C663A10B-E1F3-3981-4CAD-903CBD4B4F29","390","245",{"embedCodeDate":"2012-2-18","ticker":"NTDOY","endDate":"17-02-2012","showAnnotations":"true","liveQuote":"true","startDate":"10-02-2012"},{});}</script><div style="font-size:9px;text-align:right;width:390px;font-family:Verdana"><a href="http://www.wikinvest.com/chart/NTDOY" style="text-decoration:underline; color:#0000ee;">View the full OTC:NTDOY chart</a></div>
<p>Nintendo this week saw earnings projections to make for losses (although speculation on whether it was the fairly strong Yen (now seen to be dropping to both the Euro and US Dollar resulting in a mini investment spike) or that Mario did not do as it once did) and they also saw the purchase of their long time video codec supplier mobiclip (known also by the extension vx if you are a rom hacker and earlier in life as actimagine).</p>
Sony
<script src="http://charts.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/wikichart/javascript/scripts.php" type="text/javascript"></script><div id="wikichartContainer_041E9758-82D8-AB34-73C2-906F39BB9715"><div style="width: 390px; text-align: center; vertical-align: center; margin-top: 22px;"><a href="http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/"><img src="http://cdn.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/images/adobe_flash_logo.gif" alt="Flash" style="border-width: 0px;"/><br/>Flash Player 9 or higher is required to view the chart<br/><strong>Click here to download Flash Player now</strong></a></div></div><script type="text/javascript">if (typeof(embedWikichart) != "undefined") {embedWikichart("http://charts.wikinvest.com/WikiChartMini.swf","wikichartContainer_041E9758-82D8-AB34-73C2-906F39BB9715","390","245",{"ticker":"SNE","endDate":"17-02-2012","liveQuote":"true","showAnnotations":"true","embedCodeDate":"2012-2-18","startDate":"10-02-2012"},{});}</script><div style="font-size:9px;text-align:right;width:390px;font-family:Verdana"><a href="http://www.wikinvest.com/chart/SNE" style="text-decoration:underline; color:#0000ee;">View the full NYSE:SNE chart</a></div>
<p>Sony this week saw continued fallout from their earnings projections as well as the Vita half as well as they wished (rumours of developers jumping ship, some big general goods Australian retailers not ordering much, if any, stock of it but they also saw the split of Sony Ericsson become final (and with it some nice technology they can use).</p>
Microsoft
<script src="http://charts.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/wikichart/javascript/scripts.php" type="text/javascript"></script><div id="wikichartContainer_526FA2DE-723E-1487-DC1F-903F8C98DE04"><div style="width: 390px; text-align: center; vertical-align: center; margin-top: 22px;"><a href="http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/"><img src="http://cdn.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/images/adobe_flash_logo.gif" alt="Flash" style="border-width: 0px;"/><br/>Flash Player 9 or higher is required to view the chart<br/><strong>Click here to download Flash Player now</strong></a></div></div><script type="text/javascript">if (typeof(embedWikichart) != "undefined") {embedWikichart("http://charts.wikinvest.com/WikiChartMini.swf","wikichartContainer_526FA2DE-723E-1487-DC1F-903F8C98DE04","390","245",{"ticker":"MSFT","endDate":"17-02-2012","liveQuote":"true","showAnnotations":"true","embedCodeDate":"2012-2-18","startDate":"10-02-2012"},{});}</script><div style="font-size:9px;text-align:right;width:390px;font-family:Verdana"><a href="http://www.wikinvest.com/chart/MSFT" style="text-decoration:underline; color:#0000ee;">View the full NASDAQ:MSFT chart</a></div>
<p>Trying to sort the 360 and general microsoft stuff proved difficult. A new dash was launched although nothing much that would cause a change on the stock market (not good news for those waiting to do add in the gear for the reset glitch hack though) and there were rumours of a touchscreen controller for the successor. Equally they are being called out for their less than competitive policies with respect to XBLA and indie developers compared to similar offerings from other consoles and indeed the likes of IOS, android marketplace and social networks.</p>.
EA
<script src="http://charts.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/wikichart/javascript/scripts.php" type="text/javascript"></script><div id="wikichartContainer_80889417-F173-209E-DF2F-90B4B98AB2E6"><div style="width: 390px; text-align: center; vertical-align: center; margin-top: 22px;"><a href="http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/"><img src="http://cdn.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/images/adobe_flash_logo.gif" alt="Flash" style="border-width: 0px;"/><br/>Flash Player 9 or higher is required to view the chart<br/><strong>Click here to download Flash Player now</strong></a></div></div><script type="text/javascript">if (typeof(embedWikichart) != "undefined") {embedWikichart("http://charts.wikinvest.com/WikiChartMini.swf","wikichartContainer_80889417-F173-209E-DF2F-90B4B98AB2E6","390","245",{"ticker":"EA","endDate":"17-02-2012","showAnnotations":"true","liveQuote":"true","embedCodeDate":"2012-2-18","startDate":"10-02-2012"},{});}</script><div style="font-size:9px;text-align:right;width:390px;font-family:Verdana"><a href="http://www.wikinvest.com/chart/EA" style="text-decoration:underline; color:#0000ee;">View the full NASDAQ:EA chart</a></div>
<p>Origin which is usually pitched as EA's and in general one of the big competitors to Valve's almost ubiquitous Steam platform/service took a blow when EA's own COO said it is not quite fit to be a steamkiller gamepolitics link. On the other hand EA is the publisher of The Old Republic which is continuing to expand it seems (an Australian launch is next). However it should be noted that just before this week EA was downgraded to neutral in light of poor sales and such (a fancy way of saying invest if you want but do not expect anything that good in the near future).</p>
Ubisoft
(we had trouble getting it make a five day embed link but you should be able to select it)
<script src="http://charts.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/wikichart/javascript/scripts.php" type="text/javascript"></script><div id="wikichartContainer_1153AC8C-9F5B-9EB2-632E-906D969A501C"><div style="width: 390px; text-align: center; vertical-align: center; margin-top: 22px;"><a href="http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/"><img src="http://cdn.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/images/adobe_flash_logo.gif" alt="Flash" style="border-width: 0px;"/><br/>Flash Player 9 or higher is required to view the chart<br/><strong>Click here to download Flash Player now</strong></a></div></div><script type="text/javascript">if (typeof(embedWikichart) != "undefined") {embedWikichart("http://charts.wikinvest.com/WikiChartMini.swf","wikichartContainer_1153AC8C-9F5B-9EB2-632E-906D969A501C","390","245",{"ticker":"UBI","endDate":"17-02-2012","embedCodeDate":"2012-2-18","liveQuote":"true","showAnnotations":"true","startDate":"17-01-2012"},{});}</script><div style="font-size:9px;text-align:right;width:390px;font-family:Verdana"><a href="http://www.wikinvest.com/chart/UBI" style="text-decoration:underline; color:#0000ee;">View the full EPA:UBI chart</a></div>
<p>Nothing much here other than the predictable announcment of Assassin's Creed 3 but they are coming off the back of a series of nasty DRM complaints.</p>
Activision Blizzard
<script src="http://charts.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/wikichart/javascript/scripts.php" type="text/javascript"></script><div id="wikichartContainer_9193B15F-D931-EA14-E242-904114BE866E"><div style="width: 390px; text-align: center; vertical-align: center; margin-top: 22px;"><a href="http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/"><img src="http://cdn.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/images/adobe_flash_logo.gif" alt="Flash" style="border-width: 0px;"/><br/>Flash Player 9 or higher is required to view the chart<br/><strong>Click here to download Flash Player now</strong></a></div></div><script type="text/javascript">if (typeof(embedWikichart) != "undefined") {embedWikichart("http://charts.wikinvest.com/WikiChartMini.swf","wikichartContainer_9193B15F-D931-EA14-E242-904114BE866E","390","245",{"ticker":"ATVI","endDate":"17-02-2012","liveQuote":"true","showAnnotations":"true","embedCodeDate":"2012-2-18","startDate":"10-02-2012"},{});}</script><div style="font-size:9px;text-align:right;width:390px;font-family:Verdana"><a href="http://www.wikinvest.com/chart/ATVI" style="text-decoration:underline; color:#0000ee;">View the full NASDAQ:ATVI chart</a></div>
<p>Their CEO became a member of coca cola's board but that is nothing major in business (board members often sit on several boards). The start of the week also saw a grim forecast hit various wires.</p>
Closing thoughts
<p>What would appear to be a fairly negative week (coming off a fairly negative few months) and nothing on the horizon set to cause a big reversal (equally we do not anticipate a massive drop anywhere).</p>
