Electronic Arts Posts 2Q Loss, Plans Layoffs

their worst practice is buying up sports licenses and not porting any games over. its cheaper for them to pay off courts to keep their competitors from being able to make anything. its not right, you shouldnt be able to buy a license if you dont intend on making a game. or, at least, if you dont make the game that year your competitor should be allowed to.
 
GreenMonkey said:
This one is too easy. Translation: "focus on sequels, sports and definitely, definitely nothing original or chancy".
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Which is too bad; EA actually tried over the last three years to not focus on rehashing old games and pushing for new IPs. Things like Dead Space, Mirror's Edge, .skate, publishing games by Valve and id, all came out of that.

Contrast this with Activision who have been making a mint by rehashing the old games over and over again. Oh well, the consumer has spoken.
 
screw EA, they ruined all the old games I love lol
 
heatlesssun said:
Why are gamers cheering this? This simply means fewer games folks.
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Because it puts other developers on their toes. Welcome to capitalism the way it should be. You rush products, put out shoddy products, don't support your titles, ruin old IP's by "updating" them, stop listening to your consumer, put profits over quality, and the list goes on you reap what you sow.

EA is the GM of the game world. They didn't bother listening to their consumer base and they were content to just sit on old concepts and keep rehashing them over and over until it was too late and the winds of change had passed them over.

They've released some awesome games in the last two years, but it is too little too late. I hate to see people lose their jobs though and I hope some other studios can afford to pick them up.
 
visionviper said:
Yeah, because other forms of DRM don't count.
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Such as? They've gone to disc check DRM since Spore. People don't bitch and moan about that.

Anyway, EA going down would be incredibly bad for the industry. You people may not like everything they put out, but they contribute a considerable amount of money to the industry's yearly sales numbers. EA is the second largest third-party publisher. The only one bigger is Activision Blizzard. Not only would EA going down kill a number of great studios (Maxis, DICE, Bioware, Mythic, Pandemic, and others), but it would hurt any developer who is part of the EA Partners program (Crytek, Valve). Like them or not, the industry needs mega-publishers.
 
Climber said:
Because it puts other developers on their toes. Welcome to capitalism the way it should be. You rush products, put out shoddy products, don't support your titles, ruin old IP's by "updating" them, stop listening to your consumer, put profits over quality, and the list goes on you reap what you sow.

EA is the GM of the game world. They didn't bother listening to their consumer base and they were content to just sit on old concepts and keep rehashing them over and over until it was too late and the winds of change had passed them over.
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What's up 2003, 2009 says hello.

EA hasn't been that company for about four years now. They've tried to curb their reputation for rehashing the same old BS by focusing on new IP and pushing different kinds of games.

They've also been constantly losing money the entire time. As a counterpoint, you have Activision who have pretty much been making money the entire time by (surprise!) rehashing the same old IPs, types of games, and being complete jackasses as far as the corporate entity goes.

Its a real shame that EA got punished for publishing the better games of the "big" publishers while others like Activision are consistently rewarded for doing the things we criticize.

It justifies the Bobby Kotick style of running a company, which only means bad bad things for us in the future.
 
I'm enjoying Dragon Age from Bioware as well. I am very entertained and feel the game was worth the money. There are some things I don't like and feel EA is responsible for them. In game I talk to a NPC that offers me a quest. Thing is I have to buy it. DL content is fine but I don't need to be bothered about it in game. I already knew about it before I purchased the game to begin with. I bought this quest. Poor way to express my discontent but I was fired up to play the game and wanted the full game. It seems that a person has to be logged into EA's servers to use this premium content. I'm not sure if its just the DLC or for the game but I keep getting prompts to log in. What's worse is that while trying to play I get pop-ups that say failure to log into EA's servers, try again? They are distracting and take away from what is otherwise a very fun game. I didn't see this stuff in NW2 when Bioware was still independant. As much as I like Bioware's games I don't think I'll buy another if I have to put up with in game distractions such as these.

Climber wrote that EA is the GM of the game industry. Fine, give them their bail out money and make them sell Bioware to Opal.
 
visionviper said:
Just removing DRM from the games they make would probably net them some good savings too.
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Truth.

heatlesssun said:
Why are gamers cheering this? This simply means fewer games folks.
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That's GOOD.

WAKASHIZuMa said:
EA has their own fair share of wrong doings but for them to completely go away is not good for gaming
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No, it would be fantastic for gaming. Go out of business or change considerably; either of those would be good.
 
MH Knights said:
I wonder if this means Warhammer Online is going to get axed. A lot of potential but so little of it was fully realized.
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Apparrently 80 Mythic employees out of 200 (40%) were laid off in this cut :(... the game's actually doing pretty well especially nowadays, which made this come as a pretty big surprise. There had been talk of an expansion pack mid-late next year (2010) but that seems unlikely as most of the cuts were from the content development teams :(.
 
Not expecting from EA anything seriously good nowadays. Somewhere back in time I liked some of their games, though that was a long time ago.
 
I'm cheering this because they refused to help me replace my "play" discs that I lost when my CD book was stolen. "purchase a new copy" was what they told me. I would of never been in the situation to have to carry around a cd wallet full of cd/dvd roms to get stolen in the first place. They don't trust their customers, making them prove own a legal license in order to use a license of a piece of software that he/she paid good money for.

I bought a new copy alright, of another publisher's game.
 
I dont care about DRM.

I just hate the current implementations of them.

If EA games had done better engines, and used 4-5 months longer on EACH game, god it would be a better world :)

there you have the reason of loss.

New EA games have DRM....
 
As a notice, nfs shift wudnt start up without crack....
Bought it, installed it, tried to play it, didnt start, RAGE at EA.... first NFS that moving in the right direction= support, but wasnt very fun when it was harder than downloading from the sweedish pirate ship.
 
Earley said:
Dude, Mythic laid off 40% of their staff over the weekend. No kidding.
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I wonder how that compares with Mythic's size before EA picked them up. In other words, are they smaller with 40% off than they were pre-EA.

EA focusing on 'high budget' games is probably good for gamers. That means more indie dev houses can survive on lower-budget titles.
 
TheMead said:
I'm cheering this because they refused to help me replace my "play" discs that I lost when my CD book was stolen. "purchase a new copy" was what they told me. I would of never been in the situation to have to carry around a cd wallet full of cd/dvd roms to get stolen in the first place. They don't trust their customers, making them prove own a legal license in order to use a license of a piece of software that he/she paid good money for.

I bought a new copy alright, of another publisher's game.
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Seriously? Yah because when I have something lost or stolen I expect the manufacturer to replace it for free..

I had my car broken into 10 years ago and a bunch of games, tools, and text books stolen out of the trunk. I didn't expect that all to get replaced for free. I didn't expect them to replace my one month old game when my son decided it would make a nice toy either. You have to take care of your own stuff.

On the other hand, I found out last night that with the recent upgrade to EA's download manager you can now register many of their recent retail purchased games for download and reinstall at any point just by entering your CD key. This has been one of my favorite things on Steam for years for games that support it, and while EA downloader sucks hard, having a backup method to install the game incase the CD is damaged is a big deal to me.
 
Derangel said:
Read the rest of the post perhaps? People bitch about activation and when most people mention DRM that is exactly what they are talking about.
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True, but that in no way means other forms of DRM aren't just as insulting. Why should I have to prove I legally own the game every time I want to play? It's ridiculous.
 
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