The third quarter is always a tough one for publishers and especially for EA. That’s why I wasn’t so surprised when the company reported an $82 million dollar loss for this years fiscal Q3. That’s actually $559 million less than it lost at the same time last year, so things are looking up in the face of a continued recession.

The company does have plenty of good going too. Mass Effect 2 is already off to a great start with more than two million units shipped. Dante’s Inferno, which I covered last week, launches today. Add to it that the company’s most recent social acquisition, Playfish, had two of Facebook’s top ten games this past quarter and things don’t look nearly as dire for EA.

The company also mentioned that it was the “#1 packaged goods publisher in North America and Europe” for fiscal 2009.

Source: EA Investor Relations

You know what’s not a bad way to start a new year? How bout announcing that your latest title has sold more than a billion dollars worth. Yes, Modern Warfare 2 has reached that rare milestone among industry developments, and it’s still going strong.

“There are only a handful of entertainment properties that have ever reached the $1 billion mark,” said Activision CEO Bob Kotick, “which illustrates the power of the Call of Duty franchise and mass appeal of this game.” In case you’ve forgotten the baffling sales statistics, more than half of that billion was made in the first five days the game was available. Utterly insane.

In other new, Avatar (the movie, not the game) broke the billion dollar mark not too long ago, putting the two in a race to beat out Titanic’s $1.8 billion gross and Guitar Hero III‘s $2 billion.

Frank N. Magid Associates recently conducted a survey to see how much market penetration DLC sees. The numbers were surprisingly low, with just 15% of the pollsters claiming to have purchased DLC in the past.

The poll was for about 800 people and concluded that 41% of gamers knew about DLC but didn’t buy, while 43% claimed that they had never even heard of it. Magid Associates did say that the 43% were mostly users on consoles like the Nintendo Wii and the PS2, consoles that aren’t heavy on additional DLC for titles.

That first stat is crazy when you think about the amount of publishers who have pushed for post-release support in recent years. For a while it looked like that might be the next big moneymaker, since highly marketed titles either weren’t doing well or simply cost too much to develop. So, what’s next guys? Board game licenses for popular titles?