"NOTE: This column was completed several days before the announcement that EA CEO John Riccitiello has stepped down from his position. But this kind of served to make this column more timely than ever. While I don't really mention Riccitiello below, you can read this as a list of mistakes that led to his resignation."
EA is laying off an unknown number of individuals from across its Battlefield teams, including workers at Criterion, Dice, Ripple Effect, and Motive Studios, IGN understands.
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When logic meets EA it generates anti-matter ..... so try not to apply it in any meaningful way. Entropy is what matters in there !!
cue the apologist saying that these are mostly just contractors hired for this specific project bla bla bla
The free-to-play reboot topped 15 million players in under three weeks, but EA now claims it needs to reshape the development team.
The community warned them this would happen but nope they knew better they continued with the live service push the made the art style cartoonish and this is the result
It's always so bizarre when studios announce something super early in development under the suggestion of forming the game to player feedback, and then they push against all feedback heading straight for the cliff while everyone is warning them along the way
The Congressional Labor Caucus sent a letter to the FTC warning the debt-financed, largely PIF-owned deal could be bad news for workers
lol ya think? they're sending all that work to the cheaper labor market as soon as possible. and FYI, that labor market has exploded in the last 5-10 years. They have enough people to replace every single job. But honestly, EA is over filled with useless upper management as it is. You could probably trim 25% of their staff with no real loss in production. They aren't gamers, they're business execs. Just look at how many AI related jobs they're already starting to post. Its also hilarious that PIF owns Battle field 6
Wait,
The same congress that attacked Lina Khan when she fought the Microsoft Activision purchase.
The same congress that allowed Disney to buy 90% of Fox
The same congress that allowed Liv Golf to buy the PGA
The same congress that sits back while Paramount tries a hostile takeover despite losing the bid for Warner Bros.
NOW, the suddenly cares about doing what's "right" for works? Yeah, right.
EA now owned by The Saudis and Ubisoft to inevitably be owned by China. In hindsight, once EA and Ubisoft started having their financial woes, they should have pulled a Koei Tecmo/Bandai Namco by merging their operations into one.
I disagree with a lot of this article.
The reasons EA is struggling are mostly due to the economy, and after that, due to experiments gone wrong on platforms like new IPs, the Wii, and mobile devices. If they had "pulled an Activision", and shirked new IP to support their strong ones, they probably would be faring better.
Riccitiello was criticized, in fact, for this very thing. Great new IPs like Mirror's Edge, Dead Space, and Brutal Legend had his support, and those are some of the mistakes that hurt EA at the worst possible time -- around when the economy also started to tank. Later IPs, like the Star Wars MMO, were desperate attempts to "fix" these early errors -- but you can't simply remake WoW. WoW was also made for *very* little money -- it had a whopping 12 engineers, which is smaller than most console dev teams. Blizzard had no idea it would be so ridiculously successful, and in their blissful ignorance of the future, they didn't waste money on the 350+ people Bioware devoted to the project.
The ironic part is that gamers are CoD/WoW/Diablo sheep, and although they'd probably be happier with new IPs, they're just too dumb to take the leap and help make those concepts successful. The gaming "elite" complain about it, here on forums like N4G, but the truth is that they are the minority, and their opinion is actually the one that *doesn't* matter. Riccitiello paid too much attention to them, trying to make a big splash and impress the stockholders, and not enough to proven sheep-sales track records.
Sad, but true.