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EA Reorganizes Into Four Labels
Reuters is reporting that the mega-publisher EA will soon be reorganized into four separate labels underneath the company's umbrella. The four groups will be known as EA Games, EA Sports, EA Casual Entertainment, and a label simply called 'The Sims'. All four organizations will be supported by two additional EA groups, which will handle publishing and 'development services'. "The changes, based on the success of a pilot program that placed games based on "The Sims" franchise into their own unit, mean it will require fewer executives to sign off on new games or to approve launching an existing game on a different platform or in a different regions. "We ran an organizational experiment and it was pretty damn successful. The Sims grew aggressively," Frank Gibeau, head of the new EA Games unit said."
If EA still had competition from developers like Sega in the football games subgenre, this wouldn't be necessarily true. However, since they got an exclusive deal with the NFL over the names of teams, players, stadiums, stats, etc., they don't have to do anything but update the roster really. Although, Madden '07 for Wii, I hear, was actually innovative and fun.
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I'm actually hoping that they make "The Sims" division stand for all Sim games, not just the one they've milked to death. That would open up a lot of possibilities. SimFarm,while a horrible game overall, was a lot of fun at times; a decent update could work well. SimCity, SimEarth, SimAnt, etc. could all do well if they would focus resources on them and give them a chance. Then open up new ones, like SimMachine, and I could see things going really, really well for that division.