Former EA Chicago Employee Speaks Out

The closing of EA Chicago came as a bit of a surprise to everyone, including EA Chicago employees. Still dealing with the layoff, an anonymous EA Chicago employee laid out what it was like in the last days to 1up. He touched on the cold reaction to the closure from online readers, and the reality of EA expectations: "In Gibeau's memo, he cited the low chance of short term profitability as an overarching reason for shutting down EA Chicago. Our source claims the company simply had impractical expectations. 'I believe we were never given a fair shake. Fight Night was a huge success,' he said, but 'Def Jam was another story. The estimates for Def Jam's sales were extremely unrealistic for the game. Even if it had done well it would have never hit the unrealistic goals and projections that the marketing department made.'" Update: 11/12 21:31 GMT by Z : Corrected link. Additionally, the folks at Infinity Ward have now offered ex-EA Chicagoans the chance to work with them.

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[mikael]

Here's a link to a Former EA Staff member speaking out [1up.com]

Re:How to kill innovation

[Bobartig]

Spore, Dead Space, Army of Two, Crysis, Boogie etc. etc. EA is as innovative as any of the next top 5 major publishers (which is not very). It's not like you're singling out EA in any way with your comment. You're just describing the current state of the gaming industry.

Look at Activision, 2K, Ubisoft, THQ and how many sequels and franchise spin offs they publish. THQ spits out endless terrible movie franchise titles, which are uniformly bad.

EA cranks out a million sports titles, but that's just their exclusive licenses. Every company has their franchises, and any company that could get their hands on EA's sports franchises would do exactly what EA is doing with them.

Re:Story?

[bethorphil]

One thing that got me is that he seems to solely blame the marketing department for Def Jam's failure, even though all the reviews of it seem to suggest that the game just plain sucked. Sure, marketing may have overhyped it, but that doesn't make them responsible for the technical issues that likely contributed heavily to poor sales.

I've worked at EA. Marketing doesn't just sell the game, they pick the damn features. They set the release date. Sometimes, they even dictate the technology you will use, if it means a back-of-the-box bulletpoint.

People seem to be stuck on the idea that EA is a game company. Wrong! Electronic Arts Inc. is a titanic marketing company, which has somehow rolled up some talented coders and artists, Katamari-style. The dev team can be super-skilled and still get bulldozed along with the rest of the crap-wad. If Def Jam sucks, I wouldn't be suprised if it's because the marketing department was desperate to shove it out the door in time for the MTV Music Awards, or Dr. Dre's new album.