Number two is a tricky one. According to EA's financials the company is pretty much a top dog in the video game publishing arena, sitting just behind Activision in terms of annual revenue. However, in terms of profit, that's a bit of another story. The company's stock profile has been reeling, going from $100 in 2006 down to
$14 as of today. EA's problem is that operating expenses totaled
$2.4 billion dollars, and even with $4 billion in annual revenue it just doesn't look on the bottom line when you start talking profit. They spend almost more than half of what they intake, mostly due to research and development and marketing, and it's been that way for the past couple of years. It's like a giant tower constantly swaying in the wind while adding new floors each year; a formidable structure that could topple at any moment. Number three on the list detailed EA's massive $747 million marketing budget in 2011, something that just seems like an atrocious figure given how much could have been done to help the industry grow instead of trolling it. Part of that three-quarter of a billion dollars was used to pay the marketers to troll, something that EA was allegedly scaling back on. The viral marketer was part of a group of 560 whose jobs are purportedly being outsourced to Asia (the page stating as such has since been updated but thank goodness for
Google's Cache), however EA denied those rumors saying they're always
hiring and firing.