Massive Layoffs at EA. Mythic loses 40% of their staff.
This is obviously not a healthy sign for Warhammer: Report: Layoffs Hit EA Studios Including Tiburon, Black Box, Redwood Shores, Mythic.
According to the report, Mythic lost 80 people or 40% of their staff.
EA had a recent investor conference call, and of course they avoided giving hard subscriber numbers for Warhammer. A 40% layoff pretty much tells the tale, however. I’d say this puts WAR well below 100k now, and my previous 6-12 month lifespan estimate is looking pretty good. I don’t see WAR lasting beyond Oct 2010.
I wish everyone luck who is parting ways from EA. There are a lot of great, smaller gaming companies out there, or you can even start your own. More talented people need to get away from this mega-behemoths and work on higher quality games from smaller, indie companies.
EDIT: More, potential insider details here. “Mythic laid off 80 people today, which is about 40% of the company and responsible for 90% of the content. According to a friend of mine who left before this happened, they’re putting Warhammer into “maintenance mode.”
From the EA investor report:
EA has announced a plan to narrow its product portfolio to provide greater focus on titles with higher margin opportunities.
This action will result in the closure of several facilities and a headcount reduction of approximately 1,500 positions, of which 1,300 are included in a restructuring plan. The majority of these actions will be completed by March 31, 2010. This plan will result in annual cost savings of at least $100 million and restructuring charges of $130 to $150 million.
That sounds to me like underperforming units like Warhammer are not long for this world.
I’ve read also that EA is thinking about going back to the sequelitis design rather than the new IP experimentation they have been doing of late. That may well be part of the “higher margin opportunities” marketweaselspeak. As much as I enjoyed working on the Tiger Woods annual games when I was working as an EA minion (they actually *were* fun to work on), as a gamer, EA’s sequelitis makes me… unimpressed.
Aye, I suspect WAR is on the local blacklist. I’m a bit ambivalent about that, but unmistakably offering condolences to those who have lost their jobs.
I guess its nice for EA that they can make so much money on new, barely changed versions of Madden, Tiger Woods, etc. Obviously they would be fools to stop making those games. If they intend to be one of the biggest gaming companies out there though, how can they not ALSO make new stuff? Today’s new game is next decade’s mega sequel, after all.
Now that they own Bioware, they have at least 2 more Mass Effects and probably more in the Dragon Age line of games. Those will almost certain bear profitable fruit and would not have existed without some degree of belief in creating new IPs.
Did EA really ever stop with their sequel based design? I never noticed. LOL.
*chuckle*
True enough on the continued sequelitis, I’m just noting that they have also toyed with new IP lately, and seem to be pulling back from that.
I’m in agreement that a company that wants to stay relevant needs to keep making new IP. It just doesn’t surprise me that the numbermonkeys would want to focus on sequelitis. That’s a big part of why Brutal Legend had to find a new publisher; their original suits didn’t see it as being an IP that would work well for branding and sequels. It’s the cold, hard calculus of “profitability *this quarter*, damn the torpedoes!”, with little thought to the long term.
On a lot of blogs out there, I read a lot of people upset about how evil these big companies are. I’m sure there are a lot of evil things about EA and other big companies, but when games don’t sell, there are going to be layoffs. How is that evil?
I am very sympathetic towards these people that lost their jobs. I mean, 2 months before the holidays is not a fun time to be out of work. But jumping straight to the “evil” moniker seems a bit much.
Take Mythic for example. WAR has badly underperformed. So of course there are layoffs.
Some of the people crying about being “screwed” really should have thought about that before going to work for one of the big boys. Of course they treat you like a number. They HAVE to. They are too big to personalize their entire staff.
If you want to be treated more like a person, you should look for a job at a smaller studio.
That’s my take anyway. Of course, I’m biased, since I run a small gaming company.
That’s also a significant part of why I left my old job when the studio was acquired by EA. I understand the whims of the corporate world, and would like to avoid being a casualty statistic.