=(

jim that picture is terrible...

So what I've gathered is that we shouldn't buy EA products, because they are an ~EVIL CORPORATION~, but we should also be angered when EA lays off people due to poor sales. I mean, you people *DO* realize that if your little wet dreams came true and EA closed down for good, many, many more decent people would lose their jobs, right?

@akathatoneguy:

Did you ever think that one just might be directly related to the other? Don't you think it's its just slightly possible that if they'd stop being an "evil corporation" and started to treat their paying customers with more respect by coming out with better games and minimal (or no) DRM that they'd have better sales?

The only tragedy with this situation is that it's almost certainly the grunts who are being punished. The management a-holes who are responsible for the corporate direction that EA and taken are probably sitting all comfy in their office, ready to get that bonus because they cut expenditures.

I never shop at WalMart! Come on! We're not all that bad!

Man... maybe I should've purchased two copies of Dead Space...

I lost my job yesterday (web company) -- everyone is getting fucked by the stupid economy.

Well it's a bad economy these things were bound to happen right?

Let's hope it's the Madden team

[/sarcasm]

Sarcasm aside, this is really fucked up since their sales are up and everybody knows that sales go up during the holiday season. Precaution my ass, they just want to pocket the extra profits from the holiday season.

@ John B-

I am guilty of generalizing my comments towards a kind of combined entity consisting of all the attacks I've seen towards EA here. I honestly do not have any kind of loyalty towards EA or anyone else, but the extreme nature of the EA attack comments seems to push me further and further in the other direction.

But hey, at least you don't shop at Wal-Mart, right? I'm bummed that it's the only place to get the AC/DC Rock Band disc...

Akathatoneguy you can get the AC/DC Disc on Walmart's Online store.

So many employees just for publishing games, srsly, what does EA do exactly that warrants so many underlings?

The loss of money isn't apparently because of the economy but EA spending too much money. If the revenues are up about 40%, that EA just spend a lot more money.

Now everybody quickly think about what would have happened, if EA took over Take Two earlier this year and spending a LOT of money in the process. That would certainly have resulted in a lot more jobs being lost.

Also on a different note: EA is evil.

@akathatoneguy:

I do understand where you're coming from. I've been playing EA games since the Commodore 64 when they were one of the top 3 developers (with Activision and Epyx right next to them).

But lately they've been riding the coattails of their sports series year after year after year and they've taken a very, very negative trend towards their "customers" with their DRM and their rhetoric towards those who don't like their rhetoric. They just had another one where supposedly getting banned from the forums means getting banned from all EA games that require a login!

(I'll confess that I still have never and will never forgive them for what they did to Origin and Bullfrog, but that's another story.)

EA has gone from making brilliant software (Racing Destruction Set, Arctic Fox, Chuck Yeagar's Air Combat, etc.) to making shovelware ({enter sports title and current year here}) and displaying bad attitudes towards the public (draconian DRM). I feel badly for the people who have lost their jobs; but when management acts the way EA's management has been acting as of late you shouldn't be surprised at seeing some kind of a backlash against the company.

DRM and such aside, when has the gaming industry been a stable career choice?

@hicks I haven't had the time to peruse the coding side of it as much as I would like- but I am always down for doing character/level design for indies or decent homebrew (most of them need some good designers)- I used to do character/level/packaging design for games waaay back in the day for a bunch of PC titles when all it took to have a "studio" was 4 or 5 guys with computers and not the million to billion dollar studios that have scared me from wanting to ever go back into the industry.

Odd this would come after such an active year for EA...maybe they shouldn't have gone shopping for all those devs and perhaps they could have kept the 600 or so employees...or...wait a minute? Could they have acquired nearly 600 employees through business acquisitions and are using their 'numbers' to mask the fact that this is an evil 'switcharoo' to rid themselves of the less useful staff to create new space for the newly acquired talent? hmmm?

As sad as this is(I lost my job over a year ago from another developer) for those that lost their jobs, this is better for the game community I would think as the more you pare down your team, the better the code base benefits as usually with too many hands comes too many issues and WAY too much production as they think their staff can pump out a tonne of crap for the masses to consume. It doesn't work that way.

@NihonTiger: LOL. I knew you would say something. I was going to stay out of this one, but since you brought my name into it I'll put my thoughts out there.

First of all there is still no proof that these layoffs are going to hurt the gaming industry. We have no idea who was laid off. Typically when companies have layoffs they take the oppurtunity to get rid of people they wanted to fire, or people that were in positions that just had no significance to the company. We have no proof that any good hard working people who really contributed were actually laid off.

That being said though am I absolutely NEVER happy to hear that any company out there at all laid people off. Taking a job away from a person, especially when the economy is in bad shape and there are not other jobs out there, is just a horrible thing to have happen to anyone. I'm just hoping that these people are still able to find some type of jobs and provide for their families.

Now if we start hearing about people who really contribute to the gamign insdustry start to get laid off, then I'll start to believe the reteric that the economy is hurting the gaming industry. The interesting thing is though that if a company like EA got rid of someone good, I would hope that other companies like Activision would be out there looking for these people trying to swallow them up. You could get really good labor for really low prices.