EA just announced this week the acquisition of social games' developer Playfish for more than US$275 million and it has also announced the axe of 1,500 jobs around the world. Do you really think the big issue in the company is that they didn't do social games?
A friend of mine just send me an article from 2007 talking about the state of the game industry and it looks pretty up to date yet in the end of 2009, even after a global economic crisis, impressive. It shows how much our industry is slow to make some changes, or at least the giants, the relation to Hollywood and how immature the executives are, called as young gamer dudes on the article quoted above.
EA is crowded of young gamer dudes, and the company looks like to have the policy: When you buy some company you give to the past owners a VP title and when some employees go to a bigger salary range they also get the VP title. This is something to put on your lessons learned and avoid it on your own company, that inflates the company in a wrong manner and make it walk as turtle, slowly. With too many VPs, the company behave as it is a giant like Microsoft, but it isn't and they start firing people as investors want a more profitable company... Why EA doesn't start reviewing positions up-side down on its structure? If the company is not profitable, it is not because of its developers, but it is because of their executives (the direction given to the developers). Take Dead Space Extraction as an example, a pretty well developed game, but a disaster in sales.
Below is a tweet by a guy from the industry. It is not the first time I see something like this, more now after these announcements:
EA cuts 1,500 jobs, makes boneheaded acquisition, & keeps billions for execs. In related news, adobbs never buys EA-related games again.
With the silly Playfish acquisition we are going to see the number of VPs grow and we will receive a lot of The Sims invitations on Facebook. Of course they will create as much expansion packs they need, for The Sims on Facebook, to make our digital life a Hell. Do you really think EA employees were not capable to develop for social networks?
Hope to see EA in the golden age again.
