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In a move largely anticipated since John Riccitiello’s return to Electronic Arts with a promise to bring change, the world’s largest game publisher (by sales) has announced plans to reorganize itself to streamline operation operations and speed to market.

The company, which previously ran game development through a large number of semi-autonomous studio units, will be divided into four distinct publishing labels; each of which will be tasked with focusing on one particular genre of gaming.   The gaming labels will be:

• EA Games – which will be home to a broad assembly of multi-platform games.  It will be led Frank Gribeau.  Its titles include Medal of Honor, the Simpson’s and others.
• EA Sports – arguably the flagship, Sports will be home to EA’s leading interactive franchises from Madden NFL Football to Tiger Woods Golf to FIFA Soccer. The group will initially be led by current EVP Joel Linzer who will act as interim group president until a permanent head is chosen.

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The NPD Group released its monthly hardware sales data for May late this past week. Sales for both consoles and software were strong. As has been regularly the case for the past few months, Nintendo dominated both full–size and portable hardware categories. Overall, hardware sales accounted for $319m in revenue for the month.

Home consoles accounted for $221m, an increase of 79% over the same period last year. The Nintendo Wii led with 338k units sold. The Sony Playstation 2 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 finished second and third with 188k and 155k units respectively. The PlayStation 3 continued to struggle relative to the competition with only 82k units sold.

In the Portables category, revenue was up 45% over the same month for last year with approximately $98m in sales. The Nintendo DS sold an impressive 423k units following a strong showing in April when they sold 471k units. 221k units of Sony’s PlayStation Portable were sold.

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Wednesday, Hewlett Packard and Sony both released quarterly earnings. HP narrowly beat analysts estimates but there was little surprise after an accidental leak of news last week. The news for both companies was mixed.

Sony:
Sony’s reported a Q4 loss of 67.6 billion yen ($563 million) down from a loss of 66.5 billion yen a year earlier. The loss was attributed to substantial development costs for the PS3 and the intense competition with Nintendo’s Wii. Sales for the quarter were up nearly 13% to 2.01 trillion yen ($16.8 billion). For the fiscal year, Sony reported net income of 126.3 billion yen ($1.04b), up 2.2% over the last year.

Sony was extremely optimistic and aggressive in guidance provided for the next fiscal year. CEO Howard Stringer has set a goal of generating $5 of profit for every $100 in sales. (The company’s 5% operating profit margin target can be compared against a 12.7 percent margin at Apple Inc.) To meet the goal, Sony is forecasting they will cut PS3 losses by near 80% through increased sales and decreased production costs. The game unit is projecting a loss of 50 billion yen ($414 million) for the year ending March 2008, well below Bloomberg’s analyst survey of 83 billion yen.

Sony also expects to increase sales of their Bravia television line. Overall guidance is for a near doubling of net income to 320 billion yen ($2.7b) for the next fiscal year. Consumer electronics will account for a substantial portion of that but there should also be a significant increase in film related revenue thanks to Spider-Man 3 and the expected fall release of the latest movie in Sony’s popular Resident Evil film franchise.

More detailed press coverage on Sony’s finances can be found at:

Yahoo Finance
Google Finance
Marketwatch

Hewlett Packard:
HP reported revenue for Q2 was up 13% to $25.5 billion. Net income was down 7% to $1.78 billion compared with $1.9 billion for the same period last year. Earnings per share came in at 65c, down 1c over the same period last year. Adjusted for a one–time charge, EPS would have been 15 cents/share.

CEO Mark Hurd noted in the conference call that this was “[HP's] strongest quarterly revenue growth since the year 2000.” The company raised its revenue guidance for the year to a range of $100.5 billion to $100.9 billion, up from its prior guidance of $99 billion.

More detailed press coverage on HP’s finances can be found at:

Yahoo Finance
Google Finance
Marketwatch

Everyday seems to have at least a few headlines about Google.  Much of yesterday’s Google-related news centered on the announced release of Google’s redesigned web analytics platform, Google Analytics.  The improved user-interface and tools made with the added assistance of the folks brought on in the acquisition of Measure Map will no doubt be a help to web marketers and web masters from beginner to pro. 

The torrent of news drowned out a small, whisper of information: Google has ported its RSS reader/Feed Aggregator, Google Reader, to work with the Nintendo Wii and the Opera browser embedded in it.  The Google engineers even went so far as to insure that it works with the buttons and interface of the Wii’s innovative controller.   News of the effort was mentioned on the Google Reader’s official blog

The original Google Reader is technically still a Google Labs development project and not a fully functional, supported service/feature.  The Wii, for all its strengths and popularity, is for now (for most users) a gaming device and not a home-media PC/Device or a platform for web surfing.   Combined, those facts mean the unannounced side-project to join the two is well below the radar – probably less notable than hackers modding Apple TV to run non supported video formats as reported in March.  Still, the effort at Google might prove meaningful, or at least a glimpse of the future.

For one thing, Nintendo has been active in adding functionality to the Wii beyond its highly demanded gaming abilities and user interface.  Back in January, Nintendo partnered with the Associated Press and other news agencies to provide news through the Wii’s integrated Opera web browser.  (See the Metue article here  for more info on that announcement).

It’s also no secret that Google, like many companies, sees’s a convergence of technologies leading to some form of set-top appliance integrating the Internet, the Entertainment Computer and our Television.  (Note: I use the term appliance and set-top very loosely, it’s far to soon to know whether streaming technologies, hardware, set-top boxes, gaming platforms, DVR’s or the other potential competitors will bring the best-in breed solution for making all this happen).

Google’s first major recognition of the value of gaming, and PC-TV convergence came a few months back when they followed Microsoft’s lead and bough an In-game advertising company.  In Google’s case – Adscape Media (see here for more information)

Google’s application of its RSS Reader/Personal news aggregator to the Wii may be nothing more than a group of engineer’s “amusement-project.”  There’s no reason to insinuate it’s part of a master plan being implemented at Google.  I’m not reading much into it.  I definitely wouldn’t speculate on an upcoming Nintendo and Google partnership, but the development is fascinating.

I’d love to check it out, if only the Wii wasn’t so hard to get.

Earlier today, the wire services reported Nintendo had partnered with the Associated Press to provide an online news service through the Wii gaming platform.  Network connected Wii consoles will be able to access a free news channel through an Opera Web Browser.  As part of a 2 year multimedia distribution contract, the free news channel (there are no plans for it to be ad-supported at this time) will provide content from AP in multiple languages including French, English, Spanish and German. Additional Japanese language news will be provided by Goo, a Japanese news company.

The planned interface for the news is a graphic map.  Users will be able to navigate around the map to find regional news, and can zoom in and out to expand focus, all using the Wii’s innovative motion sensing controller.

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