Despite having improving quality ratings and well-patronized titles, EA fails to impress market analysts with its current standing. Even with strong annualized titles and good releases, analysts think that EA could do so much better.

Remember those news bits about the Wii and DS being used as educational tools in classrooms around the world? What about those educational games like Brain Training and the like? Those sound like great ways to make the non-gaming masses more open to video games, right? Well, Microsoft's Neil Thompson thinks otherwise.

I know analysts tend to have a bad rep with most of you guys, but hear this guy out. No "well gee, Mr. Obvious, thanks for the duh" moments here. Analyst Colin Sebastian talks about how the economic crisis will affect game studios and the life cycle of consoles, something you guys might be concerned with.

Although he still doesn't think that a price cut for the PlayStation 3 will be coming this year, Lazard Capital Market analyst Colin Sebastian urged investors not to count Sony out just yet. Hit the full article for details.

After GTA4, you'd think this hullabaloo would be over. But it isn't. Analyst Colin Sebastian of Lazard Capital says that new developments over the proposed buyout of Take-Two Interactive would come next week, and that Electronic Arts would likely have something new to add to their offer.

We've been taking days and weeks for granted (hence, the prevalence of procrastination among many people), but the projected January sales numbers may just show us how important a week is. According to some analysts, January 2008's sales numbers were cut off by approximately 18 percent since it is one week less compared to last year's January. Read more about it in the full article!

Just because a company is down doesn't necessarily mean that a company is out. As analysts Michael Pachter and Colin Sebastian have pointed out, THQ's underperformance in 2007 is "a painful step" to a more successful showing in the future. Fellow analyst Arvin Bhatia concurs, and he has his own words of encouragement for THQ.

You can read more about them in the full article after the jump.

The NPD Group will soon release the software and platform sales numbers for December, so it's time once again to hear from our favorite analysts, Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan and Colin Sebastian from Lazard Capital Markets. Check out the full article to find out what they predict for December's results.

The holiday season is almost here, and we'll most likely see lots of console units and gaming software end up underneath the Christmas tree and in the Christmas socks of all good children. However, too much demand that outweighs the actual supply is always a bad thing.

Analyst Colin Sebastian from Lazard Capital Markets said that there will indeed be a general hardware shortage, not only for the Wii (as mentioned by Reggie Fils-Aime in his statement that there will be a Wii console shortage this holiday season). Explained Sebastian,

Holiday hardware demand may outstrip supplies. We believe one of the themes from the upcoming holiday period could be hardware supply constraints, driven by ongoing strong demand for Nintendo’s Wii and a shift in Xbox 360 unit sales from 4Q into the September quarter, while Sony’s PS3 and PSP may benefit from lower price points.

So aside from the almost-inevitable Wii shortage, we may also witness shopping brawls over who gets the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3? Certainly not an impossible scenario, what with the release of the more affordable PlayStation 40GB SKUs, and quite possibly the newly launched Xbox 360 arcade SKU, which is aimed at the casual market.

Despite THQ's under-performance for this quarter, analysts Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan and Colin Sebastian of Lazard Capital Market remain optimistic for the game developer studio and maintains that the company's stock is still a "buy."

THQ's revenue for this quarter was significantly lower than their initial forecast, owing to the lack of sales of two of their games in the market: Stuntman: Ignition (PS2, PS3, 360) and Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights (PS3, PS2, PSP, Xbox 360, PC, DS). This, however, did not deter Pachter who, despite lowering his estimates for THQ, says that this is not likely to happen again.

Sebastian shares the same sentiments, saying that THQ's 2009 lineup seems to be a "significant improvement," mentioning their next Pixar video game adaptation of Wall-E, Saints Row 2 and the sequel to Red Faction. He predicts that the video game for Wall-E will do much better than their Ratatouille saying: "Stated simply, robots are cuter than rats, and make for better video game fodder."

THQ has announced earlier that they will be lowering their fiscal Q2 revenue guidance from US$ 240 million to US$ 229 million, and full-year sales of US$ 1.12 billion to US$ 1.06 billion.