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   For more years than we can remember now, Electronic Arts' domination over the third-party games publishing scene was so firm, that it became completely useless to point it out every single year. It was, but now it's over (finally), at least in the US. That's because the new leader in games sales for the first half of 2007 is Activision, who gathered $387.8 million from January to June, compared to just $365.7 million for EA.

   As a sidenote, considering that Activision posted net revenues of $1.5 billion for their previous fiscal year, we get a great picture of how spectacular games sales rise during autumn and the holidays season, for pretty much everyone in the industry. And since Activision's shares jumped 54% over the last year (says LA Times), we can expect this new fiscal year to bring them even larger revenues - maybe even another $1.5 billion, from now to December (they estimate $1.8 billion for the entire year).

   When interrogated about this change of things, Electronic Arts didn't risk making any comments, so we'll just settle with the following statement made by Robert Kotick (Chairman and CEO of Activision) as part of yesterday's communique:
"Our record performance was fueled by strong sales of our proven franchises Guitar Hero II, Spider-Man 3 and Shrek The Third, as well as our new intellectual property Transformers: The Game. Our balanced portfolio has enabled us to continue our leadership position across the console and handheld platforms."    The Guitar Hero franchise will be their main source of income this year, with total sales estimated to reach $360 million. But since the rest of their "hits" are mainly movie-based titluri (Spider-Man, Shrek, Trasformers), it seems like their reaching the #1 spot was in vain - they still pour out unoriginal games. Guess we'll just have to take confort in Call of Duty 4 when it launches... next year or whenever.