Zoraptor

I didn't pick Spore because it was released significantly before F3/ FC2/ RA3, which were all released within weeks of each other and thus should be generally comparable- Spore would have around 6 months more downloads counted. F3's 360 and PS3 sales are available. Assuming the whole 4.7 million sold that gives an absolute minimum PC figure, excluding purchase downloads, of 1 million. Since the PS3 and 360 figures are 'to date' rather than to Nov 2008 we can safely assume that the PC sales are (considerably) higher than 1 million. Overall sales across all platforms are important in any case, as one of the charges leveled at PC piracy is that it cannibalises console sales. I was quoting the cash only figure because that was the thing which was primarily absorbing their losses and thus showed the most precipitate decline. I'll concede the point though as it isn't really worth arguing- as I said previously EA ain't going to go bankrupt anytime soon, but at the same time multiple hundred million dollar losses (as again in the last quarter) do take their toll eventually. I thought the LGS closing article actually referenced it, though I haven't read that in years. I'm not privy to the details, of course, the gist of it was that it was an 'accumulator' type deal which required all the titles on it to return a profit in order for any to. Because British Open Golf did not sell to target (don't think the third reached release) it meant that the profit from SS2 went almost exclusively to EA. Can't say I'm surprised, I remember seeing SS2 in some torrent sites' top 10 download stats even quite recently. There's certainly still demand for it for purchase, as both SS titles are top of GOG's wishlist by a fair margin. I know anecdotally that the EA Classics version of SS2 sold very well and was (supposedly) discontinued early only because of compatibility troubles (needing a switch to install on 2k based OS, multicore/HT crashing).

Which game? RA3 (and Far Cry2, though obviously that wasn't EA, picked over 2008 download king Spore because those three were released almost simultaneously) both had similar piracy amounts to F3, despite F3 selling considerably better. Hence their piracy rate was considerably worse than for the non-protected F3. Figures were from the TweakGuide to piracy, and actually showed exactly the opposite from what the author intended. Obviously it's the company which makes a profit rather than a loss. Revenue is irrelevant if you cannot turn it into profit. EA also isn't sitting on $2 billion. I actually read their quarterly report with the multi hundred million dollar loss, for my sins, and their cash reserves are well into the hundreds of millions (still good, of course, but way down from $3 billion a few years ago). They aren't going to go bankrupt, especially since some of that cash has gone on things like buying Bioware albeit at a(n IMO) grossly inflated price, but they're hardly sitting pretty and most significantly most of this loss happened before the US economy really started tanking. I usually quote Desslock's PC Data 2000 figures and Ken Levine from Usenet post 1 and post 2 and sometimes to articles showing that the threshold for profitability was around 100k copies at that time. SS2 did not make LGS much money because of their deal with EA- in contrast, Irrational's next game was 2 years later and self published (in NA) at least implying they did pretty well from their only previous game.

It does, when SecuROM's much vaunted system resulted in more downloads than something like Fallout 3 which effectively didn't even have a disk check, and it garnered a lot of negative press. Probably the biggest problem though was the enormous support load it was generating. Using EA's own figures around 20,000 people had 'bricked' Spore within a couple of months of its release (with around 20% of buyers having 1 or fewer activations left), and the support load was still increasing. EA's lost money hand over fist for the last few years. They're not in imminent trouble though their cash reserves have dropped around 70%, and their share price had dropped around 70% as well. Revenue itself is irrelevant. Last (?) quarter 2008 they lost a huge amount (~800m USD, iirc) though that did include some one off costs. LGS is a poor example. LGS did not go out of business because of piracy, nor even because of poor sales. It went out of business primarily because of its own bad business decisions, mostly going back to the decision to self publish Terra Nova. All of LGS's late, main line PC titles (Thief 1/2, SS2) were solidly profitable, though due to a poor deal with EA they never saw much of SS2's money, and Thief 2's came too late to be of much help.

I would just point out that while "Planescape" is dead "Torment" isn't. WotC still maintains a trademark registration against it (Reg# 2778296, if anyone's really interested and knows TESS) so there's no inherent block to a Torment 2. Most interesting thing about Planescape as an IP is that apparently in 2003 they were planning on making a TV series (!) in the setting as there's an expired registration against Planescape for use in TV.