Any doubts that Electronic Arts is the all-conquering, cash cow-milking daddy of games publishing have surely been laid to rest by the financial results published yesterday evening.

Okay, so overall profits for the first quarter of $229 million bucks are actually down 7% on the same period last year – but there’s absolutely no need to sell! sell! sell! when titles such as Command & Conquer 3, Need for Speed: Carbon and the various Sims games have been doing such brisk business. And that’s to say nothing of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which sold a staggering two million copies in the space of just one week. Is that some kind of record?

But none of that’s good enough for EA’s CEO, John Riccitiello, who professes his dissatisfaction with the company’s already gargantuan market share and promises to make amends with a killer line-up for the ‘Holiday’ season. He’s got a point too, as the current roster includes NFS: Pro Street, MOH: Airborne, Army of Two, The Simpsons, Warhammer Online, SKATE, Boogie, Playground, Rock Band and all the updated EA sports titles – not forgetting that the latter have been tweaked in their Wii iterations so that your Grandma can play along with one hand.

There’s also the small matter of the ever-reliable juggernaut-of-a-franchise, FIFA, and a little something on PC called Crysis. It’s bad news in both regards, folks, as the former look like it’s slipped to the first week of Q3 while the latter killer app has actually shifted a couple of months back to November. We understand that SKATE might be missing its original deadline too.

Oh well, at least we’ll have plenty to spend our Xmas money on, and none of the above seems to have affected the revenue (i.e. total sales) forecasts for the full year, which have been increased by a cool $100 million to somewhere between 3.2 and 3.5 billion dollars. With all of the above in mind they’ll probably do it too. Yikes!