The August sales data in the U.S. was dominated by EA Sports' latest Madden, which sold 1.9 million copies across five SKUs. That's certainly nothing to sneeze at, but the performance is worse than EA was expecting. In fact, Madden sales were down 18% year-over-year and 19% in terms of unit sales. The publisher's NCAA Football game released prior to Madden didn't fare quite as well this year either.
The net result is that EA's stock has taken a 25% dip over the last month or so. Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter believes investors are overreacting, however.
"Notwithstanding the shortfall, we think that the recent PS3 price cut will stabilize sales, and we continue to believe that the company is tracking well ahead of consensus estimates," he said in a note ahead of EA's fiscal Q2 ending on October 3.
Pachter remains fairly optimistic about EA's business going forward and its slate of games. "The company’s lineup in Q2 is at least as strong as last year’s, with much higher catalog sales expected following big Q1 upside, and higher overall digital revenues. We think that EA’s slate of new releases in Q3 and Q4 compare favorably to last year’s second half," he said.
