EA losing ground in casual sector

Cowen & Company’s Doug Creutz has predicted that EA will slip drop a place in the casual and social games market within the next few weeks, with German company Wooga overtaking it in terms of active monthly users.

"EA’s user base continues to decline," a note to investors claims. "Over the next couple of weeks we expect the company to be overtaken by the rapidly growing European gaming company Wooga, and fall to number three in total Facebook gaming MAUs."

It remains to be seen if the arrival of The Sims on Facebook – which has not yet been given a release date – will reverse these trends.

Wooga recently overtook Disney’s Playdom to claim fourth spot in the market behind only EA, Crowdstar and Zynga.

The first release to emerge since Disney’s acquisition of Playdom, Gardens of Time, was recently released but has since waned after its initial popularity.

Creutz added: "Although we applaud Disney’s success with Gardens of Time, we think Disney needs to come up with several more hits (and sustain existing hits) to begin to make headway against the significant losses being generated by their Interactive Media unit."