" EA Black Box is best known as the home for a library of Need for Speed racing games, as well as the well-received Skate franchise. Tiburon is EA's Florida studio responsible for the popular Madden NFL series of sports games. Mythic Entertainment, acquired in 2006, developed the MMO Warhammer Online and also maintains Ultima Online.
EA Redwood Shores is the publisher's headquarters, and is the site of various studios including Visceral Games (Dead Space), the Tiger Woods PGA Tour team, and The Sims team."
Yikes, 40% of Mythic! That's 80 people. I hope Carrie Gouskos and Paul Barnett are safe. Can the GB guys check up on that?
That sucks. Too bad EA bet way too much on Warhammer and it flopped. Same as always, the man squeezes out the little people for more profit. Maybe a new dev studio will spring to life because of this.
I just checked his Twitter and Jeff Green is "okay on his end". In case you are unfamiliar, Jeff Green used to work for 1Up/Ziff Davis in charge of Computer Gaming World/Games for Window before moving off to EA where he did some writing on the My Sims franchise. He is now director of EA.com I believe.
'Tis the season for gutlessly laying off massive numbers of people and digging deeper into this crippling unemployment rate. Bet they're now happy they were "acquired".
Sucks for the individuals concerned but there's only so much deadwood one company can carry.
They have a couple of great developers (Bioware, Criterion, Sports) but they have about a dozen other studios that just haven't kept pace with their competitors. Westwood have run C&C into the ground, Battlefield (DICE) is now just substandard CoD, Army of Two is substandard Gears, Warhammer Online is an unimaginative WoW rip-off, Medal of Honor was done as soon as everybody left to form Infinity Ward, and Need for Speed isn't even the best racing franchise out of EA anymore. Maxis got taken off of The Sims (one zillion units sold), to go work on Spore - which is completely insane.
EA are like a graveyard for once (or never) relevant franchises and developers. They don't take the lead on anything, they just follow others but never do it quite as well. Honestly, it's about time they started shitcanning some of their tired franchises and studios that aren't pulling their weight. No company should own Bioware, The Sims franchise, EA sports and still be losing $1 billion a year - that's just wreckless mismanagement and too much fat.
dang that sucks for people that work at EA. i bet now people are going to be worried about if their keeping their jobs or not. it would be great if the people that got laid off made a new game studio. it would be a lot but it would be great if they came out with good games.
" @Jimbo: Battlefield is not substandard CoD. What an ignorant statement. "
Bad Company - which is now the main focus of the Battlefield franchise - is EA's current rival to Activision's Modern Warfare franchise. It is overwhelmingly considered to not be as good as Modern Warfare (which franchise do you think EA would rather have?). If you think it's of equal or higher standard to Modern Warfare then that's great, but you are in the minority.
That's exactly EA's problem; Bad Company is a good game, sure, but it's one example of the many areas where EA are always playing catch-up with other publishers - see also N4S Shift (chasing Forza's success) and TOR (chasing WoW's success). When was the last time EA beat everybody else to the punch on something really big? The Sims?
@Jimbo: don't forget they also have Harmonix on their side, which i'm sure brings in some nice cash on their end aswell.
EDIT: But yea...C&C started going downhill for me as soon as the Westwood name was dropped, never been big on MoH, but Allied Assault seemed to be the point where they jumped the shark, Mirror's Edge is so-so (it's got good bits...but it still needs to shave off the annoying/bad bits), Dead Space is resi 4 in space (take that how you will)....and....yea, they've killed off atleast a dozen good companies over the last 15 years, so not much sympathy for them in all honesty.
I think his point is that the Battlefield series and CoD series are fundamentally different games with different focuses. If we're talking in terms of the (ugh) mindshare the respective properties have, obviously CoD has more. But BF is not a 'version' of CoD.
" I think his point is that the Battlefield series and CoD series are fundamentally different games with different focuses. "
Which might have been true once but isn't anymore, surely? Battlefield has become BF:Bad Company and it's straight-up EA's answer to Modern Warfare - they are both AAA first person console shooters, in a modern war setting, going after exactly the same players in exactly the same market.
That's what I'm saying, this is EA's MO nowadays, spot the trends and then get there a day late and a buck short, and that attitude is losing them money hand over fist - they need to start setting the trends. If scaling back on their 'me-too' studios allows them to try and do that, then that's absolutely what they have to do.
That really sucks. Feel sorry for those who got fired, escpecially because I really like EA. They have really improved, and made some big changes, and taken a lot of risks. You can only hope, that the people will start some new companies =)
This edit will also create new pages on Giant Bomb for:
Beware, you are proposing to add brand new pages to the wiki along
with your edits. Make sure this is what you intended. This will likely
increase the time it takes for your changes to go live.
Comment and Save
Until you earn 1000 points all your submissions need to be vetted by other
Giant Bomb users. This process takes no more than a few hours and we'll
send you an email once approved.
Log in to comment