Gaming giant Electronic Arts today reported $1.04 billion in non-generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) net revenue for its fourth fiscal quarter of 2013, up 6.4 percent year-over-year from 977 million in non-GAAP net revenue from Q4 2012.

Sales of $1.04 billion were within the company’s guidance of $1.025 billion to $1.125 billion. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share (EPS) were $0.55, which was slightly below its guidance of $0.57 to $0.72, while non-GAAP loss per share was $($0.17).

EA didn’t report a non-GAAP net loss in this quarter, but expects a non-GAAP net loss of $188 million and a non-GAAP loss per share of $0.62 for Q1 2014. Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $169 million, up from $56 million from the same quarter a year ago. Non-GAAP digital revenue for the 2013 fiscal year totaled $1.7 billion.

Overall, the company’s non-GAAP digital revenue for Q4 2013 amounted to $618 million, up from $425 million in Q4 2012. Revenue from mobile, including handhelds, contributed approximately $104 million to this total.

“We remained focused on this segment due to the significant growth in the smartphone and tablet market,” says Blake Jorgensen, chief financial officer of EA, in today’s earnings call. (more…)

Game developer and publisher Electronic Arts announced that on June 14 it will retire three of its Facebook games: Sim City Social, The Sims Social and Pet Society.

EA made the announcement on its website and explained that the games were being retired so it can “can reallocate development resources to other titles.” The announcement also encourages players to spend their existing balance of in-game currency as it will become invalid starting June 14.

This is a dramatic but not at all surprising move for EA. EA’s Q2 2013 earnings report was scant on information about the company’s performance and plans for its social games. However, former EA CEO John Riccitiello then revealed the company’s changed its outlook from last quarter as it’s shifted to focusing on mobile development, killing or delaying as many as 10 different social games.

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Game developer and publisher Electronic Arts today announced John Riccitiello will step down as Chief Executive Officer and as a member of the Board of Directors, effective March 30. Larry Probst, who was CEO prior to Riccitiello, was appointed Executive Chairman while the Board searches for a new, permanent CEO.

EA made the announcement today via an official release, also stating that the company is considering both external and internal candidates to replace Riccitiello.

“My decision to leave EA is really all about my accountability for the shortcomings in our financial results this year,” Riccitiello explained in his letter to EA (published by Kotaku). “It currently looks like we will come in at the low end of, or slightly below, the financial guidance we issued to the Street, and we have fallen short of the internal operating plan we set one year ago. And for that, I am 100 percent accountable.”

Riccitiello also took pride in the strides the company has made in the mobile space, telling his employees: “You are number one in the fastest growing segment, mobile, with incredible games like The Simpsons: Tapped Out, Real Racing 3, Bejeweled, SCRABBLE and Plants v. Zombies.”

EA’s release cited Probst’s accomplishments when he was last CEO, also specifying his contributions to online and mobile. “As CEO, Probst successfully grew the Company’s annual revenues from $175 million to approximately$3 billion, led EA into new platforms such as mobile, online and other emerging markets and expanded its international presence to more than 75 countries.”

Game developer and publisher Electronic Arts today announced John Riccitiello will step down as Chief Executive Officer and as a member of the Board of Directors, effective March 30. Larry Probst, who was CEO prior to Riccitiello, was appointed Executive Chairman while the Board searches for a new, permanent CEO.

EA made the announcement today via an official release, also stating that the company is considering both external and internal candidates to replace Riccitiello.

“My decision to leave EA is really all about my accountability for the shortcomings in our financial results this year,” Riccitiello explained in his letter to EA (published by Kotaku). “It currently looks like we will come in at the low end of, or slightly below, the financial guidance we issued to the Street, and we have fallen short of the internal operating plan we set one year ago. And for that, I am 100 percent accountable.”

Riccitiello also took pride in the strides the company has made in the mobile space, telling his employees: “You are number one in the fastest growing segment, mobile, with incredible games like The Simpsons: Tapped Out, Real Racing 3, Bejeweled, SCRABBLE and Plants v. Zombies.”

EA’s release cited Probst’s accomplishments when he was last CEO, also specifying his contributions to online and mobile. “As CEO, Probst successfully grew the Company’s annual revenues from $175 million to approximately$3 billion, led EA into new platforms such as mobile, online and other emerging markets and expanded its international presence to more than 75 countries.”

This week’s departure of Kristian Segrestrale, the last Playfish founding executive at Electronic Arts, marks a turning point for the company that could shift it away from the Facebook platform. Here’s a look back at how the social game ecosystem has changed for Playfish following its 2009 acquisition.

EA at one point was viewed in the industry as the example of how mainstream publishers could successfully straddle the lines between social, mobile and traditional games. This was, in large part, due to EA’s $400 million acquisition of Playfish in 2009. It was a smart investment, as Playfish was one of the major presences in the early days of social games with user numbers on par with Playdom, Crowdstar and Zynga.

The benefits of the acquisition went both ways with EA gaining an experienced Facebook games developer and Playfish gaining access to major brands like MLB, Dragon Age and FIFA. For a short period of time, each of these Playfish-managed titles performed well in MAU and DAU rankings, but they lacked staying power beyond about 12 months. Meanwhile, the Facebook games ecosystem began to change in ways that made it harder for Playfish to maintain their position in the leaderboards. First, the platform cut back dramatically on the viral channels available to social game developers to address quality concerns. Then, the mandatory introduction of Facebook Credits throughout the spring and summer of 2011 made it more confusing for people to purchase virtual goods — because first they had to buy the platform currency and then spend it within specific games. Moreover, a player could spend Credits on any game they wanted instead of just purchasing Playfish currency that could only be spent in Playfish games. Toward the middle of 2011, as Zynga moved closer to its initial public offering, it came to light that Facebook was providing exclusive advantages to the developer (which while Playfish may have known about all along, likely came as a nasty surprise to EA). (more…)

Japan’s top grossing free-to-play mobile game Puzzle & Dragons for iOS and Android is estimated to generate between five billion yen ($54 million) to seven billion yen ($75.5 million) a month in the country, according to the Japanese press as translated by industry watcher and analyst Dr. Serkan Toto.

The estimated revenue range is based off a financial document for January 2013 that accompanied game company GungHo Online’s financial report for the 2012 fiscal year. According to the report for the fiscal year of 2012, the company saw sales grow 168.8 percent year-over-year to $280 million and operating profit increase 690.1 percent to $99 million.

In January 2013 alone, the company revealed that it saw sales of 8.5 billion yen ($92 million), a 1002.4 percent increase year-over-year. GungHo didn’t provide a platform or a specific game in its portfolio for the figures it saw last month, but that didn’t stop the Japanese press from publishing estimates about the amount of revenue Puzzle & Dragons contributed toward the $92 million GungHo saw in January 2013.

“There is absolutely no doubt in the industry over here that one game only — Puzzle & Dragons — is the main driver behind this growth,” Toto says on his blog.

The three Japanese outlets to publish estimates included Inside Games’ estimate of seven billion yen ($75.5 million), Projetista’s estimate of six billion yen ($64.6 million) and Popular Social App and Game Analysis Blog’s estimate of five billion yen ($54 million. The three estimates average out to $64.7 million, translating to about an average of $2 million in revenue per day from Puzzle & Dragons. In comparison, Finish developer Supercell was reported to be generating $1 million in gross revenue a day from two games — Hay Day and Clash of Clans. Also, Electronic Arts’ The Simpsons: Tapped Out pulled in $23 million in three months.

The puzzle and RPG hybridPuzzle & Dragons, which added moved from seven million to eight million registered users in 12 days, is a puzzle and RPG hybrid game which first launched in Japan for iPhone in February 2012 and in the U.S. in November 2012. In spite of this popularity in Japan, the game still has yet to find a sizable audience here in the States, though it’s already starting to see similar titles appear in North America like Renren’s new puzzle game Merlin’s Rage.

GungHo, known for hosting the servers for massively multiplayer online role-playing game Ragnarok Online, currently has a market cap of $2.9 billion, more than Zynga’s $2.5 billion and GREE’s $2.8 billion, but well below DeNA’s $3.6 billion market cap.

This story originally appeared on our sister site Inside Mobile Apps.

Today, Electronic Arts reported $1.18 billion in net revenue for its third fiscal quarter of 2013, down 28.5 percent year-over-year.

CEO John Riccitiello said the below-expected earnings was largely due to the disappointing performance with its recent Medal of Honor release, as well as the increasingly challenging packaged goods market.

The company revealed it saw sales of $1.18 billion, based on non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) reporting. This is below the company’s guidance of $1.25 billion. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share (EPS) were $0.57, while GAAP loss per share was $($0.15).

GAAP net loss for the quarter was ($45 million), up from ($205 million) in Q3 2012. Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $176 million, down from $334 million in Q3 2012. EA said it expects digital revenue for the year to total around $1.6 billion. (more…)

Command and Conquer: Tiberium Alliances is a Web-based free-to-play strategy game based loosely on the popular PC game franchise Command and Conquer. Specifically, as the title suggests, it is based on the futuristic “Tiberium” subseries rather than the self-conscious alternate-reality campness of the Red Alert games. The game was developed by German studio Phenomic and published by EA, who own the Command and Conquer property as a whole. It has been promoted via Facebook sidebar ads, but is a standalone browser-based game with no Facebook connectivity.

Tiberium Alliances is a massively-multiplayer “hardcore” strategy game in which players must construct a base, build up an army and then use their forces to capture territory from computer-controlled enemies and other players on a persistent world map. There are two main components to gameplay — building and combat, both of which are explained to the player through a comprehensive but unobtrusive series of tutorial quests. Pleasingly, the game gives players the option to explore the interface for themselves right from the outset rather than the more common approach many games take of initially blacking out the entire interface apart from the individual button the player is supposed to click on. This option is still available for inexperienced players, but veteran gamers will be delighted that the game doesn’t talk down to them. (more…)

Relax, folks. PopCap’s popular game Plants vs. Zombies isn’t on Facebook, even though your friends’ Timelines may be saying otherwise. This isn’t anything new, but some illicit clones have been gaining some recent traction on the social network.

As we noted in our emerging Facebook games post last week, there was a title called Plants vs. Zombies on the list. Although that game’s traffic has fallen off, another has started to rise on the social network. Our AppData traffic tracking service shows this title has 190,000 monthly active users and 3,000 daily active users. But it’s still not the real game.

We knew this wasn’t the real thing as soon as we looked at the AppData page, since “Unnamed Developer” is credited, but it should also be immediately obvious to anyone who opens the game and finds the canvas surrounded by spammy ads for non-EA titles. Not only that, but the game’s graphics are obviously stretched and fragmented.

Clones like these aren’t anything new. We’re constantly seeing random developers launch versions of classic mainstream video games like Mario Bros. and Grand Theft Auto alongside fake versions of Angry Birds and Bejeweled Blitz for a long time. Still, Timeline posts like the one pictured at right have been picking up over the past few days. Some of them are worded a bit more legitimately than this one was, but they’re all fake. Don’t bother clicking on these links until PopCap officially unveils the game (which it hasn’t hinted will happen any time soon).

Today, Century 21 is wrapping up its latest marketing campaign in the social game scene; a branded fireplace The Sims Social’s players can put in their Sims’ homes in order to earn virtual currency and expand their property. The campaign is the second partnership between Century 21 and Electronic Arts (the  first occurred last year in SimCity Social), and we recently got to sit down with Century 21 CMO Bev Thorne to talk about her company’s recent push into social games.

Although the recent campaigns within SimCity Social and The Sims Social are certainly Century 21′s highest-profile forays into expanding its brand into games, this isn’t the first time it’s done so. The first time Century 21 was involved in a social game was with ngmoco’s We City. Thorne doesn’t go into detail about the campaign, but she tells us the initial results were very strong and motivated the company to stay involved: “Our first play, if you will, in the gaming space worked out very favorably.”

Prior to these campaigns, Thorne hasn’t been involved with video games, neither in terms of marketing or as a user. However, she sees games as a huge resource to tap into, calling them one of the biggest venues where Century 21′s target customers are. “We all buy, rent, sell and lease homes. Our target customer is absolutely engaged in gaming,” she tells us.

Social games are particularly rich with potential Century 21 customers. Thorne says social gamers are 27 percent more likely to buy a home in the next year than other users on social networks. Likewise, at the time of Century 21′s first campaign, the game had roughly 10 million monthly active users, which is a good indication of a game’s reach across a social network. According to Thorne, about a third to 40 percent of the players in the game fit into the primary audience it was targeting: Individuals between the ages of 25 to 34-years-old. (more…)