Oct
25

Layoffs at EA

12 Comments

Son of fricking bitch!

More layoffs are hitting the gaming industry from a place that I didn’t expect considering its recent acquisition of Bioware. Check it out here.

Given this, John Riccitiello, our CEO, has tasked the company to get its costs in line with revenues … Every studio, group and division of the company has been tasked to review its overall headcount and adjust its organization to meet the needs of the business moving forward.

…oh, don’t worry…no executive’s salary was hurt or impacted during the making of these layoffs. Rest easy my friends….rest easy.

Apparently, a very large majority of UOs development staff was let go as well. Your guess is as good as mine what that means for UO’s future.

On the other hand, this is really NOT surprising considering how unimaginative EA is with it’s titles. It’s a huge corporation, but it’s been very stagnant. EA’s recent acquisition of Bioware will hopefully inject some much needed ideas…but I wouldn’t be surprised if Bioware gets it’s life sucked out in the process. We’ll see.

D out.

Posted in Links and News
12 Comments Posted by Darren

12 Responses to "Layoffs at EA"

  • Cameron Sorden says:
    October 25, 2007 at 11:24 am

    While I understand that it’s just business and you need to keep the bottom line in the black or everyone’s out of a job, it irks me a bit that they’re blowing big bucks purchasing new studios at the same time that they’re firing longtime employees to cut costs. If they employees are bad at their jobs, that’s one thing. But otherwise it sends a nasty message to anyone who might be considering a career in game development (although I guess EA isn’t exactly known for their wonderful treatment of their employees).

  • SmakenDahed says:
    October 25, 2007 at 12:00 pm

    From my experience of being in a company that was acquired and then being part of a bigger company acquiring another company (and several other smaller companies), there tends to be ‘restructuring’ each and every time. I’m not really surprised. House cleaning? Making room for the new acquisitions? What ever you want to call it…

  • Aaron says:
    October 25, 2007 at 2:31 pm

    He’s right. Major acquisitions are usually followed by lay-offs. EA’s not doing anything out of the ordinary there. I wouldn’t think it’s particularly callous of EA unless the folks being laid off start telling interesting stories. Lay-offs are also common during any change in management. So, again, it seems pretty normal.

    Besides, as a game like UO gets older (and UO is definitely old, as MMOs go), downsizing is inevitable. I doubt the game pulls in as much money as it did a few years ago, and making new content for the game might not make much fiscal sense anymore. I’m not saying EA’s lay-offs were right, but we certainly shouldn’t jump to any irate conclusions.

    I do wish American companies were more loyal to their employees. A large game company like that could try to shift employees to other projects, rather than firing them. But, from the outside, I have no idea how feasible that was for EA or the particular employees in this case.

  • Tipa says:
    October 25, 2007 at 3:44 pm

    People are cheap. IP is expensive. You buy a company for its IP. Then you see which of the acquired people fit into the business and which don’t.

    As said, it happens in every industry, and it’s never the people they want, it’s always the intellectual property. IP is the asset. Employees are costs.

  • Darren says:
    October 25, 2007 at 4:16 pm

    I know it happens everywhere guys….been there, done that, got the coffee mug.

    I’m just a grumpy old man about this.

    …carry on.

  • TickledBlue says:
    October 25, 2007 at 5:45 pm

    I’d disagree that people are cheap… they tend to be one of the most significant costs for any business, which is why layoffs tend to happen with disturbing frequency. I’m not sure what happens in the US, but here in Australia most employees cost the company not only in salary/wages but also insurance, superannuation and a whole host of other costs (which is why hiring contractors has become such a trend, even their much higher hourly/daily costs don’t outweigh a full time employees drain on the companies coffers, not to mention outsourcing overseas and so on).

    What pisses me off is that no consideration is generally given to each department individually. There is generally a blanket statement that X% of heads need to roll from each department, regardless of what that departments actual workload is. Most job descriptions and key performance indicators don’t cover all of what the employee actually does in their role. So you may be cutting Bob the network infrastucture coder out as the department doesn’t need as much network code written or maintained anymore, but they forgot to mention that Bob’s also been doing the nightly server backups for the last 2 years and no one is brought in to replace this function, so the next time the server crashes you lose 3 weeks worth of data.

    Of course, one aspect of this could simply be that the number of developers brought in for UO has been inflated for developement of the Kingdom Reborn UI upgrade and now that its done and relatively stable they aren’t needed anymore, but it will be interesting to see who else from other teams are laid off in the days to come.

  • The Server is Down ? Dwight Schrute Invades Second Life says:
    October 25, 2007 at 7:05 pm

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  • Aaron says:
    October 25, 2007 at 10:43 pm

    Good point, Tickled. Lay-offs should always involve input from people who really know what each individual employee does (not just their job description).

    I forget where it was, but someone once mentioned that Japanese workers often work for the same company their entire lives… that they have extraordinary job security, compared to American business. Is anyone familiar with this? I’d be interested in hearing both the upside and the downside of the Japanese economic culture.

    Ahh, I think I remember where I heard it. It was during a GameTrailers round table including Michael Pachter. They were talking about how much differently game development is often approached in Japan, partially because many game developer remain with the same company for decades.

  • Working in the Gaming Industry Looks Kind of Like Surfing on a Tsunami | Random Battle says:
    October 26, 2007 at 2:05 pm

    [...] need them anymore. What’s worse is that not only do people expect this, but they’re largely complacent about it. It’s “efficient,” from the point of view of the [...]

  • Tom says:
    October 29, 2007 at 3:38 am

    From what I have heard about the UO team is that they do have the option to move to Mythic if they want. Just what I have heard through the grape vine.

  • yunk says:
    October 29, 2007 at 2:59 pm

    I remember Matsushita did a round of layoffs in the mid-90s, and it made big news since those were the first large-scale layoffs by any company ever there. Since then I don’t know but I’m sure that’s not the only one, so I don’t think it’s so true anymore.

    Japan had a huge problem of inefficiency and waste in labor. For instance you couldn’t even get fired for poor performance, you’d just get transferred and assigned nothing to do. And get a window seat on top of it! That happens sometimes here – people getting promoted to do-nothing positions – but there it was regular. Also had a huge distribution network employing all the people who couldn’t get work elsewhere, which just added layers and jacked up local prices. This was part of why local prices were so high compared to export prices, it wasn’t just “dumping” it was their awful internal inefficiencies. This made for low unemployment but it was built on a stack of cards.

    Regarding layoffs, the only thing that bugs me is so often I see great people let go while the idiots stay. My department at one fortune 500 company was sold ot ACS who promised not to layoff people. 2 weeks later they laid off all the developers and outsourced to India. the problem was we had gotten rid of the chaff and had a great team already. All those awesome developers were out of jobs. Sure they had no problem finding new ones, but if my original company had any brains they would have found a way to hold onto them. At the new company, there were some good managers, but several really bad ones, they still work there.

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    [...] publisher) would have been able to recover as quickly as they did, and we would all be reading a Darren ?I hate the industry’ post right now. (Get a new SUWT out already [...]

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