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Electronic Arts Slashes Workforce
Dawn Kawamoto writes "Electronic Arts has been slashing jobs in recent weeks and according to Kotaku the size of the layoffs has reached as much as 10 percent of its workforce. The game maker says it's making the move to align its workforce closer to mobile and new technologies. For the console dinosaur that's trying to fight extinction by evolving into a bigger mobile player, this process has been a painful transition with a number of employees ending up in the tar pit - as well as its CEO."
Let me go get my Marshmallows. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Firing too many staff would directly impact the quality of the games produced. But, if your games are already crap to start with then you've already lost the customer base, and unless you can float the labor costs until the next successful game comes out, you're screwed. As you cut staff, what's remaining of the core product gets worse, the customer base shrinks, and you end up losing more money and having to make more cuts.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The medical term for this is "circling the drain"
moox. for a new generation.
It's called rank & yank. Great to keep a culture of stress and fear bubbling over, which is how they seem to like it at EA.
Welcome to capitalism, If you do nothing but make shitty games and piss people off until you get voted worst company in America two years running, you are going to suffer losses, or go bankrupt. (Personally, I keep my fingers crossed)
I do feel really bad for the people who work there though :(
-1 Comment Contains Portal Reference
A company firing 900 people in a single day isn't newsworthy? Seriously?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
If it's a medical term, then it has to have an ICD-10 code.
Closest I found was:
W17.1XXA Fall into storm drain or manhole, initial encounter -
but perhaps since EA has been screwing up for some time, we should use
Code W17.1XXD, Fall into storm drain or manhole, subsequent encounter or perhaps
Code 17.1XXS, Sequela of falling into storm hole or drain
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Several applications, most notably for the Amiga (although some of them also came out on other platforms like MS-DOS and the Apple IIgs). Their most notable series was Deluxe Paint, which was used for many of the 16-bit video games that were released on computers and consoles. They also released Deluxe Video (I have a boxed copy of DV3 still sitting here), Deluxe Music Construction Set. They also created the IFF file format specification, which saturated the Amiga platform (with sub-formats such as ILBM for images, ANIM for animation, 8SVX for sound samples, SMUS for sequenced music) and even lives on long after the Amiga's commercial death (AVI, WAV, and ANI formats on the Windows platform are basically little-endian IFF files with different chunk names, and AIFF on the Mac platform is also basically IFF with different chunk names and can either be big- or little-endian, but are most commonly found today as little-endian).
FC Closer
FIRE!
Yowwza! A fire has broken out! If it continues to burn, it will spread through the company. Bulldoze the cubicles around the fire to stop it from spreading. Have you put in your 80 hours this week yet or do you have sufficient firing protection?
Next week at EA, the same green-haired guy appears, a little more pleasant:
Hello! I'm Dr. Wright. You must be the new H-1B worker! Let's practice our teambuilding techniques by building a Power Plant and then adding Residential, Commercial, and Industrial zones to your cubicle. Next, connect all the zones with CAT5 and then add power strips so you can work from any zone of your cubicle and get ahead in the race to not get downsized and deported!
DRM? It turns most games into non-games, very quickly.
Seriously, EA, the best cost-cutting you could do would be to lose the DRM.
Maybe they're firing all the people who bet their careers on the Cell?
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
and they're slashing workforce? wtf? Is this a sudden dive in quality or is the better tech being used to reduce the number of developers/artists needed? They guy that did the meshes for Metroid Prime spent a month on optimization for the final boss alone. That's not really needed when you've got 8 gigs of ram I suppose.
Ah, young grasshoper, thou hast evidently not learned the subtleties of Scientific Management. Members of this group use a very special sort of language. That is, it's sort of a language, composed of technical terms (a.k.a. "jargon"). To quote TFA:
In recent weeks, EA has aligned all elements of its organizational structure behind priorities in new technologies and mobile.
The terms in bold are technical terms that thou might mistake for English. I shall translate them into normal English for thee, so you can fully understand that they are not English:
By the way, I did not comprehend your references to "Metroid Prime" and "8 gigs". Perhaps I am missing one of your little jokes again, ha ha?
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Companies that gather their wealth by leveraging artificial scarcity (bits are in infinite supply) can easily slash their workforces and continue profiting by their infinite price hikes: // Regardless of cost to create.
if ( supply == infinity ) price = 0;
If price is greater than zero then the markup tends toward infinity.
If instead the company was marketing something that is actually scarce -- it's ability to do work: configure the bits -- then their profit would be directly related to the capacity to perform work and create new content. Right now their profits are decoupled from the actual artists capable of creating works -- The people you want your money to go towards when you pay for the works. This system of publishing is flawed: By having no guarantee of even interest from the customers the publishers gamble with the fate of those making the works. If they make a great product one round, but stumble once, they are cut away as failures.
All other labor markets do not use artificial scarcity. Artists can be commissioned to make works and they can rest secure in that their efforts have been funded. Mechanics and Home builders and all service industry employees get guarantees for their work in the form of employment contracts, the laws of the land ensure they will get paid for their work. The workers under a Publisher are actually guaranteed via employment contract, but the publisher itself has no assurance that the real customer will pay the price sufficient to keep producing works.
Clearly the problem is copyright -- The enforcement of artificial scarcity. You don't own your work, the customer who paid for it does. Only by the economically untenable practice of enforcing copyright are the producers able to sell something that is in infinite supply (copies). It would be like selling ice to Eskimos, or sand to beach bums.
Interestingly, crowd funding has come a long way towards cutting out the Publishers who seek to maximize profit far beyond the cost to create works. Instead you can ask the customers directly what works they would like to fund, and then do the work for the agreed upon price, then give the works to all the public for free (because they already paid to have it created). To the artists themselves this is no different than working under the Publisher. Sadly, greed prevents most of the independent developers who crowd-source funding from avoiding the artificial scarcity racket -- They fall to the same moronic methods that the Publishers do when they sell copies. The publishers must inflate price just to justify their own existence, but their practices do not need to exist. Instead, they could simply do more work to make more money -- get assurances from the customers for payment and make new things -- and never have to worry about being laid off again.
I write this to inform any former EA employees (or anyone in their positions) that there is another way to make a living -- The way I do: You can have a solid future, but you must change your damn minds about copyrights. Market your ability to do work directly to the customers, like all others in labor markets do. If you can't manage to come to grips with the reality that selling Ice to Eskimos is a laughable business strategy for everyone involved, then at least unionize you fools! Crunch Time?! NO. That reeks of incompetent management, and abusive manipulation. It is no coincidence that the workers having the problems of instability, churn and abuse to this degree are also those that ultimately make profits by way of artificial scarcity...
Baffles me...
EA has a large number of studios all with different cultures, processes, and management. Given the size of the company there WILL be crappy work environments. Stories about these seem to get heavily magnified by the Internet lens. I've heard way worse things about other companies, but EA being one of the largest seems the easiest to hate.
Secondly, how long do you fund a money losing team/studio. At some point you have to pull the plug. If it was your money in the game you would've had it out way sooner.
Nonetheless mass layoffs are really shitty and I really feel for those devs since I'm sure some where great at their job.
You don't "lay off" in order to recruit "new people". In many jurisdictions, you can't do that legally.
Not that EA has ever cared about silly little things like employment laws.
Incidentally, I work for a 10,000+ employ software company, and to my knowledge and belief, they have never "laid off" anyone, ever.
I'd better tell management that consistent year on year growth - and regularly heading up the best companies to work for lists - is "abnormal" and "unhealthy". They're doing it wrong!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Yes, EA is a vile company that has made poor decisions over the years.
But the comments here are typically one-sided commentary that match the /. state of mind.
There are lots of people losing their jobs because of a few greedy idiot execs at the top. I wouldn't call the people getting laid off "bad rubbish" or throw out "good riddance". Often people get caught up a company and in spite of their best intentions, just cannot change a company culture. Sure, the writing has been on the wall at EA for a while, and it would be surprising if there was not a mass exodus of the left overs remaining at EA over the coming months, but its a shame when people have to lose their jobs because of poor management and bad executive decisions.
Hopefully, like with so many other past layoffs at gaming companies, the victims of one company rise up and create a new company and hopefully don't repeat the mistakes of the past.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.