Former EA Chicago Employee Speaks Out

The closing of EA Chicago came as a bit of a surprise to everyone, including EA Chicago employees. Still dealing with the layoff, an anonymous EA Chicago employee laid out what it was like in the last days to 1up. He touched on the cold reaction to the closure from online readers, and the reality of EA expectations: "In Gibeau's memo, he cited the low chance of short term profitability as an overarching reason for shutting down EA Chicago. Our source claims the company simply had impractical expectations. 'I believe we were never given a fair shake. Fight Night was a huge success,' he said, but 'Def Jam was another story. The estimates for Def Jam's sales were extremely unrealistic for the game. Even if it had done well it would have never hit the unrealistic goals and projections that the marketing department made.'" Update: 11/12 21:31 GMT by Z : Corrected link. Additionally, the folks at Infinity Ward have now offered ex-EA Chicagoans the chance to work with them.

Comments

Other links

[mikael]

Here's a link to a Former EA Staff member speaking out

Re:MARKETING DEPARTMENT !!!

[techpawn]

I try to keep the marketing/sales guys as far away from the development staff as possible. I tell them WHAT to sell not the other way around. When you have marketing/sales driving development you get a lot of pretty widgets that don't really do anything until the first "bug fix" or unrealistic short sighted applications that go over budget and undersold.

Sweet Vengeance

[blueZhift]

It sounds like EA Chicago kinda got the shaft. It'd be sweet vengeance if they formed their own company and beat their old employer with something fresh and new. It seems that developers everywhere need to be ready to take fate into their own hands because the corporations will boot you out the door without hesitation to meet some short term goal. Innovation doesn't generally blossom in the short term. Heck, given a chance, what they were trying to do in Def Jam might have evolved into something great. I mean people probably laughed at those quirky Japanese rhythm games when the ideas were first floated. Now I, and many others can hardly wait to spend $100USD to whoop it up with fake guitars and other instruments.

Re:Sweet Vengeance

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I used to be one of those laughing at guitar hero, but now I'm sad and my guitar gently weeps. It weeps for all of those that play on a crappy plastic thing incapable of its virtuosity. It weeps as men sell their souls for a lifetime of pretending to cover other peoples songs. Ask not for whom it weeps, for it weeps for thee.

Re:Sweet Vengeance

[badasscat]

The reality is probably that nobody got "the shaft", but also that it wasn't the employees' faults either.

I think there is a tendency among a lot of people to take this kind of thing personally. There's nothing personal about it. EA doesn't see this as laying off a certain number of employees; they see it as jettisoning an unprofitable part of the company. Nor should they see it any other way; we don't live in a socialist economic system, the whole point is to be profitable. It's not up to EA's board of directors or CEO to get to know every single employee and pledge to take care of their families forever, regardless of anything.

Employees, likewise, know there's always a risk of a layoff when they're hired. That's part of the bargain. In return, an employee is allowed to quit whenever he wants, with a reasonable expectation of finding another job in fairly short order. That's a freedom that people in many countries don't have.

I think this unnamed former employee is taking all of this a little too personally. Yeah, it sucks to get laid off - I've been through it too. But there was nothing personal in the firings and there is honestly probably nothing personal in the "cold" comments he's reading on the net either. All anybody on the outside knows is the games that this division put out, and that they're a part of a giant conglomerate that everybody hates as a matter of course. Those are what we have to judge this studio by. So how can he blame anyone for being harsh? People are just making a judgment based on the information they have. It's got nothing to do with him personally.

He feels bad now, but he'll get another job and forget all about this eventually. My being laid off sucked, and the job I got laid off from was probably the best I ever had, but it ended up advancing my career. I'm sure that I wouldn't be making the money I'm making now if I was still stuck at that job, and I likely wouldn't have a house or a wife. You never know how things are going to play out, and what's going to end up being the catalyst you need to take the next step in your life.

Re:Sweet Vengeance

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wanted to mention that I used to work for EA, and while they do seem like a monopolistic 800 lb gorilla, they still, at the end of the day, try to take care of their own. The fact of the matter is that EA studios are run against each other (just like any other set of competing game companies). If your company cannot sustain dollar amount X, well, you have to go. It's just the economics of EA, and everybody working for them knows that. This being said, whenever there is a studio closure (and there have been plenty, many of which nobody notices), the staff of the closed studio are (for the most part) offered relocation to other EA studios. Unless someone really shows no value for the company (i.e. would have to have had a really bad evaluation etc.), they will still have a job if they want one. It's just that they will have to move. And most times, said job moves come with some sort of payout for having to move/being terminated etc.

So, while it may be depressing, it is far from the end of the world. Besides, if they REALLY don't want to move, there are still a small number of developers in Chicago that I'm sure would be more than happy to take on new experienced staff. Experience in this industry is lacking.

Just my 2 cents.

Re:Sweet Vengeance

[Bobartig]

Right. Only 80 hours. Apparently your management isn't familiar with the principle of diminishing returns. Startups aren't even run that way any more, at least not in silicon valley where I work. Smart startups and VCs these days are much more interested in sustainable, stable companies than the boom/bust nonsense of the .bomb era.

Working crunch at EA may "only" take 80 hours of your week, but trust me, there's nothing left after that because the work is challenging. If you're pushing much over 80, your job is time-consuming but easy, or you're just planning on a quickly approaching burnout sometime soon.

Re:Sweet Vengeance

[mikael]

I would have hoped that EA had the common sense not to have two studions working on titles in identical genre's. That happened to other multi-studio game developers. The theory was a nice idea; let every team work on whatever interested them. This certainly attracted staff and the company grew massively, but in the end, they end up with multiple numbers of teams around the place competing against each other for the Christmas/Summer holiday slots.

How to kill innovation

[bflynn]

Shame, shame, shame.

Innovation might be EA's mantra, but their actions are fighting against it. When you're working in the fields of innovation, for every spectacular success, there will be at least one spectacular failure. And probably many more than one. If you're not willing to accept those failures as the cost of innovation, then you have no business calling yourself an innovative company. EA just told every one of their developers "don't take a risk. Do it the safe way."

If you want to blame anyone, blame the management. With proper technique, they should have known well before final production which games would make it and which would flop. EA is obviously a company on the decline.

Brian

Re:How to kill innovation

[Bobartig]

Spore, Dead Space, Army of Two, Crysis, Boogie etc. etc. EA is as innovative as any of the next top 5 major publishers (which is not very). It's not like you're singling out EA in any way with your comment. You're just describing the current state of the gaming industry.

Look at Activision, 2K, Ubisoft, THQ and how many sequels and franchise spin offs they publish. THQ spits out endless terrible movie franchise titles, which are uniformly bad.

EA cranks out a million sports titles, but that's just their exclusive licenses. Every company has their franchises, and any company that could get their hands on EA's sports franchises would do exactly what EA is doing with them.

Re:Story?

[eln]

Not a whole lot of additional meat in the article, anyway. Basically the guy feels lousy because he got laid off (been there, done that), and says they were never given a chance, and expectations were unrealistic, etc.

One thing that got me is that he seems to solely blame the marketing department for Def Jam's failure, even though all the reviews of it seem to suggest that the game just plain sucked. Sure, marketing may have overhyped it, but that doesn't make them responsible for the technical issues that likely contributed heavily to poor sales.

It sucks that these people lost their jobs, and I sympathize with the fact that they're being lambasted for sucking all over the Internet, but on the other hand they made crappy games that sold poorly. On top of that, they worked for a company viewed as evil by most people who care about these things. So now, instead of being mocked for working for a lousy company on lousy games, they can now be mocked for formerly working for a lousy company and formerly working on lousy games.

My advice to this guy would be to step away from the Internet until the chatter dies down. If hearing that EA sucks and EA Chicago deserved to go down because they sucked is going to get him depressed, he should avoid the kinds of sites that are likely to say those things. This whole story will die down as soon as people like him stop contacting game sites to complain about it.

Re:MARKETING DEPARTMENT !!!

[DarthTeufel]

I agree with your sentiment. I once had to lay off 20% of our production plant because marketing/sales couldn't meet the goals they laid out justifying the capex. Most depressing day of my life hands down.

Since then, I've made it my personal crusade to call bullshit on Sales and Marketing. I got an accounting degree, but most of the people not smart enough to get a real business degree got a marketing degree.

While a necessary part of the business, I absolutely hate them.

Welcome to the world of work

[ScotchForBreakfast]

I like games, and to a certain extent I feel some kinship with the folks who make them. So it is a bummer when I see those places closed down.

At the same time when I hear these stories of development locations or developers being closed down and the subsequently whining by a few of them I can't help but think "welcome to the world of work". Seriously, gaming is a business like any other and regardless of realistic or unrealistic expectations, or just random unfairness stuff like this happens.

Re:Welcome to the world of work

[Psychochild]

Day late, dollar short, all that. That's what I get for not reading Slashdot daily. ;P

The problem is that game development is a creative endeavor. Part of what makes a team work well is team chemistry, and it's not easy to go to a new place and instantly feel that chemistry. That's one of the problems with modern game development, because otherwise promising teams are axed merely by looking at the bottom line and ignoring the other factors that can't be put in terms of dollars and cents on the balance sheet. Game development, despite it's similarities with software development, is much more similar to putting together a movie or play rather than coding a business application.

Yes, game development is a business; I was an editor for a book on that very topic. But, there's much more to maximizing profits in the industry than simply increasing profit and/or lowering costs.

Re:Story?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, kdawson would have links to the wikipedia entries for EA, Chicago and 1up before not linking to the interview.

Re:Story?

[bethorphil]

One thing that got me is that he seems to solely blame the marketing department for Def Jam's failure, even though all the reviews of it seem to suggest that the game just plain sucked. Sure, marketing may have overhyped it, but that doesn't make them responsible for the technical issues that likely contributed heavily to poor sales.

I've worked at EA. Marketing doesn't just sell the game, they pick the damn features. They set the release date. Sometimes, they even dictate the technology you will use, if it means a back-of-the-box bulletpoint.

People seem to be stuck on the idea that EA is a game company. Wrong! Electronic Arts Inc. is a titanic marketing company, which has somehow rolled up some talented coders and artists, Katamari-style. The dev team can be super-skilled and still get bulldozed along with the rest of the crap-wad. If Def Jam sucks, I wouldn't be suprised if it's because the marketing department was desperate to shove it out the door in time for the MTV Music Awards, or Dr. Dre's new album.