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.
@Street Fighter X Tekken DLC will never come to Xbox 360
I get Dan’s point, placing the DLC on the disk is like dangling a carrot in front. And yes, since the DLC is already distributed, then why not get some money out of it?
@Vivendi finding few buyers for Activision-Blizzard
Thing is, the game industry is quite tough. Spending N billions to buy a piece of it is quite a risky bet. Miss-manage it and you’re never going to recover the investment. So I can understand why nobody is rushing to buy.
As from the potential buyers point of view, Vivendi desperately needs money. Play your cards right and you can get Activision-Blizzard at a nice discount đ
@âWouldnât be surprisedâ if more aggressive PC games start to appear
Hitting a Diablo 3 home run: good luck. It’s hard to do for any platform, not just the PC.
Erm, no cycle detected on my end, always KB and mouse here.
@Grand Theft Auto V will support planes and jets, wonât have beta test
Not a fan. Loved Mafia though.
@ Question of the Week.
I was going to say ‘No’ initially, but I saw the hardware specs, so it’s a ‘maybe yes’ now. Android is hackable, it has a USB port so ….
Gearbox: âWouldnât be surprisedâ if more aggressive PC games start to appear: For the record, I got excited as soon as I heard you say that Borderlands 2 would have drag-and-drop inventory, because Borderlands’ huge number of items and weapons makes it a pain to navigate through the inventory with the consolish setup it had. Other than that, all I got that Gearbox was placing a huge bet on the PC, and telling everyone how great it will be to be a PC gamer.
@OUYA: Good for them for tons of funds, but this can also be the point where a Kickstarter goes horribly wrong. Seriously, from what I understand they pretty much said “we’re going to try these bunch of different ideas together and see if they stick”. Let’s hope they’re successful and manage to create a great platform.
@QOTW: Probably not. I barely play Android games, and I doubt any huge games will be on the system before anyone knows how successful it will be.
And yes, Gearbox are looking for headlines: http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/07/24/randy-pitchford-plagiarism-is-rife-in-the-industry