Sometimes math can really sum up a situation well.
.Today brings both interesting news and bad news out of Electric Arts. It was announced that EA has sank $300 million into purchasing Playfish, a casual game studio that’s made a splash on Facebook. While casual web games are certainly no new thing for EA, there is no doubt in my mind that they’ll be pulling in some good revenue with this purchase. Which makes the other news announced about them today all the more surprising:
Even though they just spent $300 million on that purchase, EA has also laid off a significant portion of their employees, and sources are saying that includes 40% of Mythic. According to EA, the total number of people being laid off totaled to somewhere around 1500 – no small amount – and was done because it was necessary to transform their company. Gamasutra has a ton of information in those links on this if you are looking to find out more exact details.
This was surprising for me to hear, and definitely pretty depressing. To all of you who lost your jobs, I wish you the best of luck. To EA… Probably not the best idea to announce a major studio purchase when you’re laying off a bunch of people, related or not.
