Report: Electronic Arts Readying to Layoff 500+ Employees
In a move that probably comes as no shock to those in the know, EA will shortly begin a massive layoff of anywhere between 500 to 1,000 employees. That’s about 5%-11% of their total employees. To be perfectly honest, it’s not the least bit surprising given the poor performance of titles like Battlefield 3 and the recently launched Star Wars The Old Republic (An MMORPG that seems to be on a one-way track towards Free 2 Play status). While It’s never nice to hear that hundreds of people will soon be without work during an economic downturn, one has to wonder if all this could have been avoided by not chasing titles like BF3 out of the release gate with a ludicrous $30 million advertising budget, or releasing a run of the mill MMORPG with a rumored budget in upwards of $130 million. Actually, their business practices need a lot of work in general.
Here we have a company that created the fabulous “Project 10 Dollar”, an experiment that has become a festering annoyance to countless consumers who can’t even bring a game to a friend’s house these days, let alone expect to buy a finished product anymore without a significant DLC investment on release day. Electronic Arts has so mistreated its customers that, in a world full of corporations that routinely destroy the lives of common citizens, EA somehow pulled off the feat of being the worst company of 2012. Not to mention that EA’s CEO, John Riccitiello, is a man who casually muses about how easily they could charge people mid-game in BF3 to reload and that gamers would be too absorbed to even care.
httpv://youtu.be/ZR6-u8OIJTE
Normally this story would probably just be a simple blurb with little in the way of commentary or perspective. In this case however I feel it’s important to speak out and make it clear that even a massive corporation like EA has to reap what it sows, and that no amount of marketing or PR campaigns are going to keep gamers everywhere from seeing your bad practices for what they are. The rehashed sequels, abominable reboots, online passes, day-one on-disk DLC, ridiculous EA account bans, cannibalization of smaller developers, and insistence upon shoving Origin down PC Gamer’s throats did nothing to help EA’s continually falling stock prices.
I’d like to say that events like these could become watershed moments that make people like John Riccitiello open their eyes and see that offering real value to gamers is the way to go in the long run, rather than using doing their best to make it sound like they’re doing everyone a favor by nickle and diming the shirts off your backs. However, more than likely, they’ll just blame CoD, piracy and the used game industry and try to milk us even harder on their way down. I guess time will have to tell.
UPDATE: Apparently EA was quick to respond to the rampantly spreading story and issued a response, telling MCV “There are no lay-offs as such, we always have projects growing and morphing. At any given time there are new people coming in and others leaving. EA is growing and hiring and building teams to support the growing demand for digital games and services.”
Frankly, with phrases like “as such” liberally thrown into the mix, this response just doesn’t read like an outright denial. In fact it seems to me that they’re pretty clearly saying that a good number of current employees will indeed be leaving EA while a similar or greater amount will soon enter as EA attempts to bolster its casual online gaming division and possibly its Origin service. Again, we’ll have to see how it goes in the long run.
Seán Whitear
April 16, 2012 @ 4:45 am
I wanted to love SWTOR, but it just turned out to be WoW in a prettier package. The story has kept me somewhat interested but the gameplay is almost exactly the same.
They played it safe there and it’s costing them now with dwindling subscriber numbers and sales. D:
Taylor Parolini
April 16, 2012 @ 4:55 am
That’s what happens when you spend in upwards of $130 million on an MMORPG whose only innovation is voice acted semi-interactive cutscenes. As you said, other than that it didn’t do anything special. Plus Bioware and EA’s handling of the entire thing has just been insane. From removing the unsub buttton right before people would start getting charged subscription fees, to widespread bans for dancing out of designated dance zones, to practically holding your NPC relationships hostage in whiny “please come back” emails. It’s crazy.
Daniel Flatt
April 16, 2012 @ 5:43 am
I for one absolutely love SWTOR and think that it beats the pants off any other MMO out there. “Voice acted semi-interactive cutscenes” DO add tons to the game as it actually gives context to what your doing and makes the overall quest interesting.
People know what they are doing and why they are doing it in the game, where as in something like WoW they are just clicking through quest descriptions as fast as possible. In addition the game was one of the least buggy MMOs I’ve played, especially at launch.
Painting a picture of doom for it doesn’t help as recent reports have it as actually hurting the juggernaut WoW, which like it or not, is a big deal.
Either way I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom when you have 1.7 million people playing your game and paying $15 a month.
Robert Strick
April 16, 2012 @ 7:46 am
While they were able to garner a bit of success early on during launch it’s apparent that a huge portion of subscribed users just don’t have interest in the game anymore. That’s just fact.
I’d like to try it down the line. From what I hear Galaxies was much better before they ruined that community and game.
Daniel Flatt
April 16, 2012 @ 10:19 am
I suppose it all depends on what you like. Galaxies at first was a buggy mess that denied fans like myself what they really wanted; to be a Jedi.
SWTOR is played by many like a single player RPG. I put in 80 hours just to get to level 30 and the storyline was still interesting. Many of the people that stopped playing had more to do with they had reached the end of their story then anything else. End game content IS a problem in SWTOR, but I think that will change over time.
Even if it does end up free to play that’s not really a bad thing. I think eventually most every MMO will be free to play because you can reach a greater audience that way. A lot of subscription MMORPG that went free to play actually make more money off that model so it’s far from a death knell.
Either way I enjoy it for what it is to me, an enormous single player RPG that I just so happen to have to play online. I got my moneys worth for sure.
Taylor Parolini
April 16, 2012 @ 10:52 am
In my personal opinion, Star Wars the Old Republic is an incredible disappointment. Now I’ll freely admit that I’ve never played the game (and probably never will), and I’m willing to take the criticism for that as my argument unfolds. However, aside from the amazing CGI trailers that predated the trailer, everything I’ve seen and heard about the game has seemed like a negative.
As far as game mechanics, it doesn’t offer anything that can truly outclass other MMO’s out there. Rather than taking a more visceral approach like titles such as DCUO wherein you actually have full control over your character and control each and every attack with a button press, the game very purposefully sticks close to WoW’s combat. I feel this has nothing to do with what sort of experience they wanted to create, and everything to do with making the game familiar and instantly accessible to WoW’s audience in order to try and steal a chunk of their subscriber base.
Next down the line is that, quite frankly, the cutscenes are bad. I’ve seen lots of videos about the games story, and in my opinion the animations and storytelling are incredibly stiff and quite amateurish. If it were, as you suggested, being looked at as a single player RPG, then I’d personally consider it to be a single player RPG with sometimes passable but routinely awful voice acting and romance, with badly animated amateur grade animations throughout. That and I’ll never get over the fact that SWToR’s new canon turns Revan into a mid-tier boss that can be hacked to death, along with HK, and that they destroyed the canon of KotoR 2’s canon and made the Jedi Exile into what amounts to being a shell of her former self.
The game may not have an overwhelming prevalence of bugs, but the ones it does have can effect the gameplay in ridiculous ways. Such as how you can dance a boss to death. Not to mention the sheer amount of outright shenanigans going on with Bioware and the manner in which they police the game, going so far as to ban people for dancing outside designated dancing zones, or banning them for grabbing higher leveled loot from an area they shouldn’t be doing at that level (despite their being no level lock keeping people out, they were banned in some cases just for being able to min max and get ahead of the game, which really wasn’t their fault). Then you also have situations where the PVP sections of the game were so unbalanced that the Republic side was utterly destroyed and spawn camped by countless Empire players that were able to hit some of the highest levels within hours, and Bioware was incredibly slow to act and apparently refused to do a rollback, thus giving the imperials a massive advantage for ages to come. Shenanigans like removing the unsub button the day before people were going to start being charged subscription fees for their original purchase, and the blatant “oh god please don’t leave us” of the founder medal. When people found a workaround for the missing unsub button by directly linking its URL on the forums, those threads were closed and deleted by moderators. Not to mention the draconian practices of the moderators on their forums, and the way in which Bioware/EA hold your character relationships hostage by sending former players emails in which they beg you to come back and finish your quest with generic companion character #4.
The fact that they’re already giving away 30 days free to level 50 players to make up for their total lack of endgame content and to mitigate the droves of people trickling away from the game, just goes to show how close it is to heading towards a Free 2 Play model, and while it may very well succeed as a F2P title, for what was meant to be an incredibly successful MMORPG title with a massive $130 Million+ budget and more advertising than you can shake a stick at, it’s a sheer embarrassment for EA (and it’s falling stocks) that the title has done so poorly in a relative sense. It’s for all these reasons and, many more, that I will probably never lay my hands on the game because, at this point, I refuse to give these people my money if it’s not in order to cover and review a game for others.
Daniel Flatt
April 17, 2012 @ 9:00 am
I agree with you on one thing, I will call into question the fact that you’ve never played it. Personally, I know you a bit better then this, but it would appear to some your not much more then a Bioware hater. This is the second Bioware game that you haven’t played, but are quick to tear apart and your argument reads like someone who googled “why SWTOR sucks”.
If you haven’t personally played the game I have a really hard time respecting any of the rest of the comment, but I will address some of the more bitter sounding and fallible statements.
“As far as game mechanics, it doesn’t offer anything that can truly outclass other MMO’s out there. Rather than taking a more visceral approach like titles such as DCUO wherein you actually have full control over your character and control each and every attack with a button press, the game very purposefully sticks close to WoW’s combat. I feel this has nothing to do with what sort of experience they wanted to create, and everything to do with making the game familiar and instantly accessible to WoW’s audience in order to try and steal a chunk of their subscriber base.”
WoW is a juggernaut that is easily accessible, but gets it’s hooks in people fast; it’s no surprise that other games want to copy it. No, SWTOR isn’t a paragon of change, but really name me an MMORPG that people actually play that is. Sure you can shove DCUO up front (which I HAVE played by the way), but during the first year of the title it had the same problems of balancing, awful animations, problems with end game content and other things that you state SWTOR has.
“Next down the line is that, quite frankly, the cutscenes are bad. I’ve seen lots of videos about the games story, and in my opinion the animations and storytelling are incredibly stiff and quite amateurish.”
Again, you judge by watching youtube videos. Here is the thing, yes, I consider the thing a hefty RPG that I have mostly played alone, but you really can’t judge the animations and voice work against something static like Assassin’s Creed. It’s the ONLY MMORPG that has fully voiced quests and storyline and that massive of content of course you can pick a few pieces of the story and tear them apart. Overall I found most of the voice working, especially by the big names in the game, to be wonderful by any video game standards.
“Such as how you can dance a boss to death. Not to mention the sheer amount of outright shenanigans going on with Bioware and the manner in which they police the game, going so far as to ban people for dancing outside designated dancing zones”
Ok so the thing is here, you could certainly jump on that bandwagon of nonsense, but lets be honest here. People were cheating to kill bosses by exploiting a glitch in the system by dancing. Those are the people that were banned and most it was a very light penalty. Something like Skyrim would be banning someone every other second for exploiting this, but since others are involved it automatically makes it unfair.
“and the blatant “oh god please don’t leave us” of the founder medal…….and the way in which Bioware/EA hold your character relationships hostage by sending former players emails in which they beg you to come back and finish your quest with generic companion character #4. ”
Oh this is probably you at your most bitter and hateful by spinning harmless marketing into some sort of draconian practice. First of all the please don’t leave us founder medal was given out a month after the first release for players that bought the game and were still playing it anyway. It was a nice bonus to say thanks for sticking with us and if anybody paid 15 dollars for the next month if they were done just to get a digital medal that’s really really sad. Secondly with the emails to come back, every MMO I’ve ever played in my entire gaming career has the same emails. Usually they are boring and generic and amount to we really miss your money. SWTOR instead appeal to the story side of things, which is the main draw in the first place. Wow, even marketing is evil to you when it comes to Bioware.
“The fact that they’re already giving away 30 days free to level 50 players to make up for their total lack of endgame content and to mitigate the droves of people trickling away from the game, just goes to show how close it is to heading towards a Free 2 Play model, and while it may very well succeed as a F2P title, for what was meant to be an incredibly successful MMORPG title with a massive $130 Million+ budget and more advertising than you can shake a stick at, it’s a sheer embarrassment for EA (and it’s falling stocks) that the title has done so poorly in a relative sense. It’s for all these reasons and, many more, that I will probably never lay my hands on the game because, at this point, I refuse to give these people my money if it’s not in order to cover and review a game for others.”
And yet again, oh they are releasing free stuff how evil. Speaking for the masses you not joining the game is probably a good thing. We don’t need a hater to drag down the experience.
The bottom line is that SWTOR is the penultimate game for a Star Wars fan and a completely solid game in most regards. Picking apart and tearing down every mistake could easily be batted aside by listing a hundred things the game does right, but I don’t have the time.
Honestly Taylor, I understand you’re bitter about some of the practices across the game industry (that include much more then Bioware), but your constant bitterness and borderline hateful articles are painting the website in a poor light. Hey 500 people might lose their jobs, Taylor’s response: “YAY HAHA EA THAT’S WHAT YOU GET!”
Readers, there are us here that actually enjoy playing video games and not just dragging out every bad thing ever in some pointless crusade. Oh and better yet some of us actually play the games that we do commit to saying aren’t worth your money.