The podcast is back, with a healthier Jonah joining Jordan. No Dan or Paul however.
The news:
Question of the Week: “What are you most looking forward to in 2014?”
This week’s gaming podcast has all three personalities doing their thing. We’re finishing up our historic look back at Sega while answering a couple comments and hammering out the news. No flashback this week, we just ran out of time. This weeks news includes:
This weeks question of the week revolves around a bit of journalistic integrity and who do you trust when reading game news articles on the Internet? Folks like the Wall Street Journal or more focused gaming blogs like Kotaku, 1up, Gamespot and others?
Electronic Arts is planning to lay off 1,000 employees, approximately 10% of their employees. In this layoff their also consolidating EA Black Box back into EA Canada. EA Black Box was spun off as a studio outside of EA Canada to work on such titles as Need for Speed but, with the layoffs arriving, they’re going to be merging the remainder of EA Black Box into EA Canada by June 2009. The remaining EA Black Box employees will continue working on Skate 2.
The pink slips should be issued by March 31, 2009 and we’re hoping the folks that have lost their jobs will find new jobs as soon as possible. An Electronic Arts representative said:
“This does not mean that the Black Box studio is closing. The studio is moving to our Burnaby campus to share the facility with EAC and other EA teams that operate out of our state-of-the-art facility. We will operate two distinct studios, each with their own distinct culture and teams, out of our Burnaby facility.” (gamespot)
EA hasn’t mentioned any specific franchise cancellation but we’re going to assume something is going to slip, it’s hard to imagine a company can lose 1,000 employees without impacting business operations. If EA was able to layoff 1,000 people without impacting day-to-day business, then they’re definitely hurting in the management department because that would be a ton of waste.
Big companies may cut costs during hard times but they said they’re, “implementing a plan to narrow its product portfolio to focus on hit games with higher margin opportunities. The company remains committed to taking creative risks, investing in new games, leading the industry in the growing mobile and online businesses, and delivering high-quality games to consumers.”
We’re curious just how much EA is willing to risk on “creative” endevours considering publishers are already hesitant to break new ground. The next few years should yield great opportunities for smaller developers to put on their creative hat and open new doors and opportunities for themselves.
This week, Paul is still not available, which is unfortunate, since the Gaming Flashback is the classic DuckTales for the NES. There’s also a bunch of scintillating news items including:
We also reveal the winner of the Pixie Diamonds contest.
Hi guys, great show again. 🙂
I like the idea of turning in a CD or just even having the old DRM code to get a digital version of the game. This is what Blizzard does with their library. I was able to get digital versions of Warcraft III and StarCraft because of my old DRM codes I had been holding on to. I think more companies should do that since we did buy the game, why should we have to pay again for a digital version?
@Steambox: I thought there was only going to be one but apparently there are going to be 13 of them priced from cheap to VERY expensive. This may be a good and easy way for people to find the steambox that will be suited to their needs.
@Sony streaming old games: I agree that I want this and that they should make their entire library available. The fact that Jordan still has a functioning backwards compatible Ps3 didn’t go unnoticed. I’d love to get one myself but the issue is they stop making these consoles so it isn’t easy to get an old console to play an old game. Much easier to just get an emulator (at least for PS1 and PS2).
@QOTW: I am most looking forward to Pillars of Eternity, it promises to be a great RPG game. Among other Kickstarter games like Wasteland 2 and Shadowgate.