I stumbled across this little gem tonight, and it got me fuming:

Shares of Electronic Arts Inc. fell nearly 3% to $17.75 on Thursday morning after an analyst with Brean Murray Carret & Co. cut his price target on the stock to $22 from $28, citing concerns about the recently released online multi-player game “Star Wars: The Old Republic.” In a note to clients, analyst Todd Mitchell wrote that “creeping concerns” about the performance of “Star Wars” — which was released in late December — is causing him to trim his earnings estimates for the 2013 fiscal year. “Specifically, initial sales appear to be below expectations, and casual observation of early play is causing us to rethink our churn assumptions,” Mitchell wrote.

Ok, so one guy who has ‘casually observed’ some early play, combined with some guesswork on sales numbers that only EA / Bioware would know at this point, makes EA shares drop nearly 3%.

Whether you love or hate the game, can you see the insanity in a system that drives perceptions that way? If SWTOR sucks as a game, well that’ll become apparent when people leave it in droves. That’s a better measure than one guy putting making prognostications without nearly no data. It’s the equivalent of this site being the arbiter of whether SWTOR is good for oceanic players or not. We may have an opinion but we don’t package up the little turd nuggets we publish each day and claim them to be expertise from up on high.

My rant’s over but I’d love to hear yours. Do you think one person should be having such an impact?