A 3rd law firm has now come out with a new class action lawsuit against Electronic Arts for you know what.
Brower Piven, based in Stevenson, Maryland, has filed a class action lawsuit in the Northern District of California, on behalf of purchasers of EA common stock between July 24 to December 2 of this year. This time, they do not provide details of the case they are building up, and likewise, no class has been certified yet in the abovementioned action. When they determine the lead plaintiff, that person will get to direct litigation, including naming counsel, as well as members of the class.
In essence, Brower Piven’s case is the same as what RGRD has already revealed: EA violated the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 by failing to disclose the bugs, connectivity issues, and other problems in the development of Battlefield 4 within the class period. These problems, having been uncovered on November 15, led EA to announce they would delay future projects until these issues were fixed. (I would like to point out here that yes, I know DICE made the announcement, speaking only for themselves. It does appear that this law firm may not yet be fully informed on the details, but they will be soon.)
I think a somewhat false picture may be getting painted in these reports, so I’d like to bring up what I think is happening. Of course, all this hullabaloo started from that December 4 announcement, that did lead to EA shares losing value to a significant degree. Since that time, EA investors were sending out feelers to find out what was going on with EA, not just DICE, and when they learned that many of EA’s top execs sold their shares at a key period, they ran up to different law firms to file cases.
We may be hearing of even more cases in the near future, since EA’s investors would have been based around different parts of the country, and different state laws and regulations would require investors to go about suing EA in different ways.
While I would not want DICE or EA’s many other talented dev teams on the road to financial ruin, I think their parent company EA needs to account for the long term damage they have done to the Battlefield franchise. I leave this whole enterprise up to a higher power now: courtrooms across the US. We hope the cases end quickly and conclusively for everyone’s sake.
