Poor game sales? Star Wars? What’s to blame? Not much telling.
The report claims between 500-1000 employees will be affected. That’s a lot of people, even for a company as big as Electronic Arts.
Startup Grind’s report goes on to speculate the layoffs are a result of a disappointing 2011 in which a few hit games (like Battlefield 3) had their sales overshadowed by an overspend on marketing, expensive acquisitions and disappointing subscriber numbers for big-budget MMO Star Wars: Old Republic.
Via: Crazy Kotaku
It’s sad that they could bleed us so thoroughly and they still are having a bad year. I would love to see the breakdown of gross sales for each game. It would be interesting.
Since it seems like the Sims franchise has been low-balled, I’m not surprised. That would explain the lousy decisions they’ve been making. Maybe.
Is this so they can pay Katy Perry? 😉
All part of marketing.
I didn’t think subscriptions for Old Republic were that bad — at least to start with. I know quite a few quit, because it got boring and redundant. Oh well. I wouldn’t be surprised to see these layoffs affect the Sims Studio. Either we’ll get crappy-thought out EPs and SPs, or maybe they’ll wise up and just work on one EP a year.
I wonder if Sims 4 is being worked on? We heard about Sims 3 during this length of franchise time with Sims 2. Hmm.
See, EA finally bit off more then it can chew and swallow. they are suffering for their crappy products & practices… Hope they realize online/MMO’s aren’t doing anyone any favors. Old Rebulic looks awesome as a game, I was disappointed when I learned it was an MMO. Like so many things EA’s done lately… Maybe they’d be wise to scrap sims 4 and do a reboot?
Sims 3 seems like a reboot, rather than an improvement to Sims 2.