EA's Profits Up, Workers Get Layoffs

Gamespot and GamesIndustry.biz has the news from yesterday's conference call where EA CEO Larry Probst reported higher earnings for his company in Q3, despite a small yearly decline. He also held forth on the future cost of next-gen games, which in his opinion will likely stay as high as $50 and could perhaps fetch more on retail shelves. Just before this story was to be published, Tim Butler wrote in with the news from 1Up.com that EA was laying off members of its LA studio. From the article: "According to sources close to the company, Electronic Arts is currently in the process of laying off between 50-70 team members from its minty-fresh new EA LA office. The teams affected worked on the poorly-recieved GoldenEye: Rogue Agent and the forthcoming Medal of Honor: Dogs of War FPS titles." Update: 01/27 06:34 GMT by Z : Update to the layoff article: "The first step is to rebalance the team. This has required us to let go 60 people -- from many different teams. There is no focus on any one team or any one class of individuals. It's a studio-wide thing to reset the business fundamentals and get the studio to the next level."

Re:Team Balancing ACT 2005

[Antonymous Flower]

there are simply too many willing-to-work-25-hours-a-day multimedia graduates

So there really is life on Mars?

I think we all know how they'll manage without em.

[Dunarie]

Guess this means everyone left is going to have to be pulling 100 hour work weeks!

Sweatshop 2005

[j1bb3rj4bb3r]

New from EA Games... Sweatshop 2005 where you start a 15 year career as a team manager putting out world class video games. You must keep your team happy-ish, while driving them to the brinks of insanity. New features include 'personal day approval' where you must decide whether letting your multimedia developer go to their mother's funeral is worth the slip in schedule. Transfer team members to other lower performing teams in order to maximize your cost/benefit ratio. Upgrade your staff with 'efficiency experts' for that extra paranoid boost of productivity. Move up the ranks of the corporate ladder while crushing those who stand in your way. Collect praise and bonuses for the slave labor of your subordinates.

I'd play it.

Re:I'll say it right now

[Capt'n Hector]

I'm bitter about today's PC gaming.

Really? You sure do a nice job covering that up; It's hardly noticable.

Not the first company you can think of!

[CrackedButter]

Replying with Microsoft, gets me modded as Funny or Flamebait.
Replying with SCO, gets me modded as either Troll or Insightful.
Replying with IBM gets me modded as Overrated.
So that leaves HP doesn't it? I can't keep up with who is our friend this week on slashdot.

Re:I'll say it right now

[CrackedButter]

Er... ummm... so you still wanna come round mine and LAN right?

Hey we should thank EA for this one.

[Spy der Mann]

Let me rephrase TFA:

"As a good-will gesture, EA has cooperated with our demands and released two groups of hostages, who obviously seemed overexhausted to deliver inferior products. The hostages are currently under rehabilitation (read as: Finding a better job). Due to the fact that this good-will gesture resulted in profits for the company, EA decided that it will release more groups of hostages in the course of the year. Maybe they're not so bad after all.

And here's Mike with the weather."

Re:I'll say it right now

[Richard Frost]

Don't worry; Duke Nukem Forever will change all of that! Mostly because of the heat death of the universe, but, hey, you gotta take what you can get.

Re:If the game was bad

[BlowChunx]

Golden Eye: Rouge agent

I gotta believe that a cross dressing Bond would have attracted a larger audience...but that's just me. Or did you mean rogue agent?

Re:I'll say it right now

[Dasein]

...generate enough electromagnetic fields to shrivel the balls off your legs ...

Um. If your balls are attached to your legs instead of your crotch, you need to see a doctor.

EA hiring

[BagMan2]

Nothing gets the slashdot geeks fired up quite as much as a good firing. I'll tell you a little secret -- most every large company does this. They hire people like crazy, then every couple years they fire all the ones that didn't work out as a group and call it a layoff.

Doing it this way prevents all sorts of legal issues where people sue for getting fired without cause. If they are part of a group layoff, the company can simply call it scaling back the workforce and largely indemnify themselves.

Most of those fired would likely have been fired months ago when it was determined that they were incompetent, but doing it that way is too messy. Having been through many of these 'cycles' at the company I work for, I always find it interesting that within one month of the firing, the company is once again hiring again, only those fired are inelligable for re-employment for a minimum of one-year (company policy -- sneaky sneaky).

This whole thing is likely little more than a company getting rid of the bad apples without having to worry about the lawyers.

Just think...

[elmegil]

if they laid off ALL their employees, their liabilities would be zero and their profits infinite!

The Big One

[CastrTroy]

Anybody who's seen Michael Moore's The Big One would know that this is the standard way that companies operate. Lay off everyone just when you're starting to go good. Sad to see a Canadian company doing it though.

Re:EA hiring

[BagMan2]

"Isn't is amazing, truly spectacularly amazing that these exhaustively qualified people who had such sparkling resumes and fantastic employment histories only months ago when they were hired suddenly turn out to be incompetent around layoff time?"

Happens all the time. I've hired people who look great on paper, but then end up not working out for various reasons. Sometimes it's not competence per se, sometimes it's their work-habits, sometimes they are simply difficult for the other team members to work with.

Whatever the reason, the company is perfectly within their rights to get rid of the person and try to find someone better. Often times employers hire more people than they need, then prune off the ones they like the least. Repeating this process over and over is an effective way for the company to raise the employee quality over time.

Sometimes the layoff process is really what it is claimed to be, an arbitrary scaling back due to changing or unforseen business needs.

I know people like to think they deserve to keep a job once they get it for however long they are meeting the job description, but thinking that way is best left to the communists.

Become a consultant, for fuck's sake!

[jlseagull]

Stop whining if you lost your job. Become a damn consultant! I was making $4500 a month working at a fulltime job as a grad fresh out of college with an M.S. I got laid off with their entire R&D department. So instead of looking around for another corporate butt to kiss, "please massuh, give me a job...", I started my own consulting company at the age of 25.

Six months later, I'm raking in $8100 a month and surprisingly no one questions my age. I have two patents in the works, and I'm on the verge of renting an office down the street so I can walk to work. I and only I am responsible for my own success or failure.

Life rocks!

Re:Become a consultant, for fuck's sake!

[Adam9]

Which toll-free number do I call to learn all of your powerful secrets for only $49.99? ;)