Slashdot Mirror
EA's Profits Up, Workers Get Layoffs
Gamespot and GamesIndustry.biz has the news from yesterday's conference call where EA CEO Larry Probst reported higher earnings for his company in Q3, despite a small yearly decline. He also held forth on the future cost of next-gen games, which in his opinion will likely stay as high as $50 and could perhaps fetch more on retail shelves. Just before this story was to be published, Tim Butler wrote in with the news from 1Up.com that EA was laying off members of its LA studio. From the article: "According to sources close to the company, Electronic Arts is currently in the process of laying off between 50-70 team members from its minty-fresh new EA LA office. The teams affected worked on the poorly-recieved GoldenEye: Rogue Agent and the forthcoming Medal of Honor: Dogs of War FPS titles." Update: 01/27 06:34 GMT by Z : Update to the layoff article: "The first step is to rebalance the team. This has required us to let go 60 people -- from many different teams. There is no focus on any one team or any one class of individuals. It's a studio-wide thing to reset the business fundamentals and get the studio to the next level."
If you had read the friendly article, you would have seen the update:
After speaking to Neil Young, General Manager of the EA LA studio, it's now clear that the confirmed 60 layoffs are not heavily confined to one team or another, countering early rumors that the GoldenEye or Medal of Honor teams were specifically targerted -- countering the implication that the underperformance of certain games might have been the catalyst.
Maybe EA is shaking its developers up for the foreseeable battle with TakeTwo?
And it's undeniable that EA is in a good position to pull this kind of team-balancing stunt, because there are simply too many willing-to-work-25-hours-a-day multimedia graduates. If you come across an apple tree full of apples, you'll surely pick the best ones too.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
A business acting like a business! Boooooooo! Hissssssssss! Profits up and they fired people? Well, good god, only evil can be afoot. There's no other explination!
I didn't hear that Rogue Agent did badly. I bought the thing and loved it.. yeah, it had some aspects that were obviously a knock off of halo, but some of it was innovative for an FPS, and parts of it were a hell of a lot of fun.
EA is evil. EA represents the suit-and-tie, corporate-owned, mainstream conversion of the gaming industry. They represent cheesy CEOs coming over from other failed companies who are only getting into the game industry because they see massive annual revenues from this thing, not because they're into games. Merely ten years ago, we had a sort of Silver Age of gaming, from Doom to Descent to Command & Conquer to Myst to Simcity 2000 to...well, you were there. It all spanned multiple genres. Where is it now? The good games are far and few between. Now, it's the yearly update of the new Tony Hawk game, complete with skateboard fat clowns that spray graffiti, and the "underground racing" games where morons who think neon lights are a good investment tell each other how "sick" their "tricked out" cars are as obnoxious, over-compressed, repetitive rap music blasts while you race down wet, nighttime city streets. Because that's "underground!" Meanwhile, the PC industry purposely speeds itself up faster and faster to increase the yearly bullshit upgrade cycle. If you don't have a video card with two fans taking up two slots in your translucent, neon-lit PC case, your penis just isn't big enough to play the latest id Software game made up of approximately 90% pitch black darkness on-screen. Innovation? Fuck it, let's fuck up Deus Ex so we can get on the console in time while we destroy Fallout 3. After that, we'll suck the teat of the latest Microsoft DirectX release, focus-group tested with a new name ("DirectNext! Because it's the NEXT one!") guaranteed to generate 87% profit margins on new graphics card updates. And that blazing fast PC you custom-built last year? Fuck it, better ditch that because your goddamn RAM chips aren't operating at a fast enough speed to melt the paint off the wall and generate enough electromagnetic fields to shrivel the balls off your legs as you read the latest paid-for review in a dying game magazine.
I'm bitter about today's PC gaming.
The cynical answer to this would be "no comment." So obvious is business' contempt for education and an honest day's work now that it becomes pointless to even discuss it.
But each time anyone attempts to emphasize the fact that business has turned its back on just about everything except its quarterly earnings, we get "nobody owes you a living so get over it."
The fact is, it is wrong to fire people like this. It is absolutely wrong. These companies are damaging, and in a lot of cases destroying the careers of people who work for a living. It isn't fair and it isn't right.
EA has no problem investing millions and tens of millions to build colossal glittering corporate edifices where they can hold meetings about whom to fire this week. But on payday they claim costs are too high.
W-4 employment is obsolete.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
That being said, after reading all of the crap that EA has been putting their employees through, I refuse to buy a game from them anymore. The last sports game I bought was Tiger Woods Golf 2004 for my PS2, and that WILL be the last game I'll buy from EA. Period. I refuse to give my money to a company that gets away with the slave labor antics and rediculous headcutting that EA has graced us with. While all those 100-hour-a-week programmers get sent to unemployment, EA's CEO still gets his 7-figure salary and a fat bonus. And YES, I realize that my Old Navy jeans are made in China and my polo shirt was made in some third-world country. Exploitation goes on worldwide, and I've come to terms with it. This is just one battle that I choose to let affect my purchasing decisions.
So basically EA, fuck you. I'll take my $100 a year that I would have spent on your products and go to one of the two or three remaining competitors left in console gaming. Or maybe I'll go buy some basement-made games like Uplink instead. Or maybe I'll just say screw you all and go buy used NES games, which still entertain me way more than your 'Sports Title $YEAR' titles ever will. Either way EA, you can kiss my money goodbye.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
Companies have to make profits. If they don't, then they won't be able to employ anyone.
They are making profits.
If they're talented, they'll find new employment.
So they can get fired again. I gotta ask: when do we get real jobs? Not bullshit temp work, but a REAL FUCKING JOB?
What's wrong with that?
Nothing, until their car gets reposessed and the bank forecloses on the house.
Nothing at all.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Maybe they shouldn't have spent all their money on an all glass building 1/2 mile from the beach, compelete with full soccer field. Perks are nice, but nothing beats a reliable paycheck.
in bed.
As far as your comment that this is "certainly not stuff that matters to most people here," this is, in fact, important to a lot of people here. This is news that actually affects people. It's certainly much more significant than "Oregon's Governor Backs Open Source Development" or "Running Windows Viruses Under Linux" as I'm sure the number of people who live in Oregon or the number of people who want to run Windows viruses under Linux is much lower than the number of gamers in the world.
It was all I could manage not to mod you down, as I seriously don't think something so uninformed should be modded +5. However, I really don't like to mod people down, so I'm saving my points to mod up more worthwhile comments.
I don't want to have to defend EA here, but do we really know if they're worse than the rest of the industry? I'd never work for a company like that, but let's remember that this whole thing started from the blog of a wife of an EA programmer. Now we have slashdot posting everything they do. I'm not saying they *aren't* the antichrist, but let's actually consider first whether there's some manipulation or just plain shoddy reporting at fault too.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Losing your job is a fact of (American) life.
Fine. Then say so. Don't tell people "work hard, get an education and get a good job." Tell people the American dream is "they'll fire your ass."
If not, then maybe they don't belong in their current field?
And who makes that decision? Oh, the same people who just got through firing several dozen employees? Yeah. No problem there.
There are thousands of thousands of average companies that hire average employees to do average jobs.
But I thought they had to be talented?
If their car got reposessed and their house foreclosed, whos fault is that?
Hey, they showed up and did their job. They held up THEIR END OF THE BARGAIN.
It behooves a person to ensure he/she can afford an item they own, be it a car, house, motorcycle or television.
That's why they worked their ass off to get a good job.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
"And they were compensated for it."
This comes down to whether they were on contract to do just that job or whether they were full time employees. Before you say "sure sure, thats just being pedantic" hear me out
If they were contracted to do just that job, then they would have expected to be paid for a short term job ie. a higher pay than a permanent employee. If they were a full time employee, then part of the bargain of the employee accepting lower pay than the contractor is the implication made by the company that by accepting the lower pay there is greater job security.
I guess what Im getting at is that if a company does not want employees on for long periods, then it should not offer permanency to staff. If it does offer permanency with the knowledge that it plans to downsize the employee in the forseeable future then it is being dishonest as it is promising permanency only with the view to reduce how much it has to pay.
Dont want permanent employees - only hire contractors. That way both sides know what to expect from the arrangement.