Broken Toys Random Comments About Games and Tractors

Purely gut-wrenching. To announce that many cuts and the gutting of Warhammer (which is what this is appearing to be), and then turning around and doing a, “HO-HO-HO WE HAVE A FACEBOOK APP DEVELOPER NOW!” makes me sick. Having been a victim of the EA Layoffs back in February, my hopes are that none of the people I know who are still working there were laid off. Best wishes to those that were though, times are brutal it seems.

@TPRJones – probably not many investors though – you’d need sizable startup capital, and getting people to front up for an MMO in this market…?

Bittersweet.
On down side, all these people are no longer working.
On the up side, all these people are no longer working for EA.

Step 1: Spend $300 million on Facebook app developer.
Step 2: Cut jobs to save $100 million a year.
Step 3: Profit!

Tricky Ricci’s logic in this escapes me.

I set my clock by EA layoffs. They should officially declare November 1 “Resume Day” for all EA employees.

Matt: EA (and many other companies) are bound to a publicity cycle set forth by their Articles of Incorporations, and which are almost always quarterly reports with one such report being designated the most important annual report.

The interesting thing is not that you can set your calendar by such business rhythms, but that business have set so much stock in their own internal calendars and the reactions of “stockholders” when those documents are due… Mostly because at this point all of these big businesses now have side bets on the numbers contained in future reports. Lay-offs and acquisitions, it seems today, have just as much to do with gambling and divining rods as they do with actual business needs.

(My cynicism only continues to grow as to the nature of business in the current economy.)

I was really hoping we were done with these stories.

Anyone figured out how Playfish can make $75m a year? Only thing I could find was ads revenue and if so, way to cut down on people doing real hard work for something that’s mostly vaporware and could totally collapse anyday.

It’s not like everyone and their mother predicted layoffs when EA bought Mythic or anything. Just look at the comments on this blog when they were acquired.

I have to agree with Boanerges. It is so much easier to spit on EA because it is big and is not a human face.

EA provides jobs (even with some lay offs, they still provides benefits to other people more than any of us).
EA publishes games.
EA didn’t get government bail outs.
They might have made bad decisions, but no matter how much money they are wasting, that is their decision to make. I don’t want other people to tell me that I should not buy a new PC because it is expensive.

EA, just like all other indy game developers, puts up with huge risks when they start up. Any indy game who are bold enough might raise up and became another EA. EA might make bad mistakes and went bankrupt too. You should not blame this bad economy on EA.

I wonder if this has anything to do with email I just got telling me my closed 10 day free trial of WAR just got turned into an open endless free trial.

If the people at Mythic didn’t want to be fired they should have made less shitty of a game. Warhammer cost an enormous amount of money to develop, and was a completely miserable effort for an AAA MMO title. Poor engine, poor coding, poor just about everything.

No Tem, This is why capitalism is successful. The studio who spend millions on shitty games close while those that do publish good games stills rolls in the cash.

Capitalism is heartless, yes, because we consumers are heartless when we choose how to spend our hard-earned money. That is a good thing, in the long run ressources, both human and material, are allocated to those who perform best. Mythic, was sadly not one of those.

@Random Poster

“300 million for a facebook game developer???? You just click buttons, its a damned browser interface..there’s no “game””

Wake up and smell the coffee sport. You might not think that Farm Town and Farmville are “games” but several millions of people disagree with you. Including my wife and trust me, you don’t want to get on her bad side

Congratulation wowpanda, you have understood what so many have yet to understand…

“This plan will result in annual cost savings of at least $100 million and restructuring charges of $130 to $150 million.”

Can’t forget the yearly one-time restructuring charges. Note how every year’s “one-time” charges offset the “annual” savings.

Too bad for Pandemic– felt like they were always on the cusp.

If the people at Mythic didn’t want to be fired they should have made less shitty of a game. Warhammer cost an enormous amount of money to develop, and was a completely miserable effort for an AAA MMO title. Poor engine, poor coding, poor just about everything.

I’ve played shitty games. Warhammer wasn’t shitty. It just made the mistake of promising to be a WoW killer. Nobody’s truly produced a WoW killer yet… unless perhaps you count free to play games which play fairly similar, like Runes of Magic.

I think we all understand that if a corporation isn’t hitting its numbers, it will have to do something. Layoffs are a part of modern life now. Companies don’t value employees like they used to.

It’s just that EA often seems so short-sighted. WAR sold over a million copies, so a lot of people were interested, and yeah, a lot of people sampled and left. It was never a bad game though. There’s potential there for a good expansion title to sell well, I’m convinced. There’s potential for WAR to grow its subscription numbers just as EVE has done, provided there’s an investment in WAR and changing some things. Instead, it looks like EA is abandoning it.

The new EA, which looks to publish 30+ titles, down from 60+ last year, is an EA that would have never funded development of The Sims. Consider that.

(This kind of retrenchment is going on elsewhere, too. I read recently that funding for indie films is way down. Studios are much more risk averse.)

Of course there’s no way to know it, but it stands to reason based on the market call EA made that they are more risk averse now than before. They are going to lean on established franchises and games that tie in with other media, most likely. They are not in the business of developing new I.P. now.

Ouch. Although I despise EA because they just launch shitty title after shitty title it sucks that so many people got axed. Probably they were crunched for all their worth before the cut. Another reason to despise EA.

But is the down turn due to the economy? Or the state of the games industry?
As a gamer, I would say the former.
I stopped buying games well before the recession just because I wasn’t happy with the product being offered.
I still have disposable income – but I am still not buying games because I am mostly still not happy.
Interesting thing is though that some companies are apparently doing quite well?
And gaming on Facebook is booming? So the gamers are still there. (Yeah it’s free on Facebook – but that is not the point.)
From what I am reading Dragon Age: Origins is also selling well?
But I am also hearing it is a high quality game?
Hmmmm…. maybe the quality matters more than the recession?

How’s that Hopenchange working out for you now?

Would be better, perhaps, if certain people weren’t so quick to buy into the lies of insurance companies so we could move the focus past our atrocious health care situation and squarely onto employment.

In any case, you’re really in no position to complain seeing how it went from 3.7% to 8.5% when Bush Jr. was in charge. The same chart says we’re only up to 9.5% (granted, this is the national average, not how it might be in your particular county). It’s equally amusing where you seem to think our national debt comes from in griping over a 1 trillion dollar plan after the last guy was responsible for hundreds of trillions.

I hope there’s room for games after China buys us out.

I fail to see how anything related to Mafia Wars could be worth 300m USD.

@geldonyetich
don’t pick on the cognitively challenged

I come from a family of educators. Thus, in confronting one not particularly good at learning, I believe persistence may produce results.

But, to try to reroute things back to the topic at hand, corporate America is generally a muddled mess that needs to stop devaluing talent and instead putting it to work on something other than desperate flights of fancy.

Yeesh, lousy timing. For what it’s worth, we’re looking to fill a few positions, so if any of you are keeping an eye out for work as a result, say hello.

I don’t see how the recession is to blame for Warhammer being terrible. Barack Obama, nor George W Bush himself, did not cause Mythic to have to invent a new unit of time measurement to compensate for how unresponsive their game was to player input. How long is it going to be before people realize that Warhammer was fundamentally flawed to the core and that’s why it failed, and why Mythic has to be ‘restructured?’

The UI was less responsive than VB apps I wrote on my 486 back when I first learned to program.

It is fascinating that given the current economic times are are living in people are still wondering why big companies let go of a good chunk of their staff and concentrate on the areas where there is potentially a shitload of money to be earned and that everything gets reviewed for profitability down to the last job.

What should EA do? Keep all their staff and continue as they did before? As sad as it is, and I say this as a subbed and enthusiastic WAR player, but some of the studios that got the axe now pay for the unmet expectations of their product. Or for the overhyped product that was not what it should have been, call it what you want.

It is a time of consolidation we live in and to think that the computer entertainment sector is not affected by it is downright stupid thinking.

This is the best time to *not* fire all your employees.

If you have the cash or cash flow, you transfer them to longer term projects so when we come out of the recession you are ready to hit the ground running while all the companies who slashed their budgets are facing a crises of aging infrastructure.

Of course, the real politik of the economic world is that if you are a public company, this is an impossible move, since your stock price will crash due to the concerns of short sighted investors and you’ll be raided for your cash and put out of business.

Strangely, the pro-capitalists think a system which forces companies to act in such inhumane and inefficient manner to be working-as-intended.

As was pointed out upthread, only stock holders seem to buy the illusion that a $130 million restructuring fee to save $100 million a year is a good idea. The rest of us know that that supposed yearly saving will not show up on future balance books.

@Muckbeast: That’s amusing, because in some industries, being part of a big company give you *more* job security, not less. But on the other hand, big companies can percolate even greater asshats to their top positions.

It still exists, it’s just not as common…

What industries are those, Guy? I noticed in December every single big company took their turn to summarily fire 10% of their staff. Funny how all these organizations had the exact same amount of fat to trim, no? Certainly not a case that panicked stock holders were demanding CEOs prove that they were “cutting back” and 10% being a nice round number to pass onto underlings as the proper amount to fire.

Muckbeast has it right. You either work for a big company that won’t go out of business, but will fire you for no reason one day, or work for a small company that may go out of business for no reason some day, but at least won’t fire you on a whim.

“Unless there exists jobs where your employer is contractually obligated not to fire you, I remain skeptical.”

Or a job where demand for employees is vastly larger than supply due to government regulations mandating qualifications

You define job security as your employer not being *able* to fire you? I don’t think that’s what job security used to mean when it was common. It just meant you could reliably make a lifetime career at one company. Although, come to think of it, unions would make it hard to lay people off, and unions used to be stronger, so there is that.

Interesting fact, though: in Germany, there *are* laws that make it less desirable to lay off workers, and encourages them to keep them on as part-time workers if they really need to save money. Companies in France are also far less likely to lay off workers. This has benefits to international divisions of certain European companies located in the US.

Industries where you are less likely to be fired due to the size of the organizations are typically industries that depend on large government contracts, such as aerospace, defense, and infrastructure. Infrastructure should do well now, since stimulus funding is easiest to justify for large government-funded infrastructure contracts, which are always useful (especially considering the US’s infrastructure, of any kind, be it roads, bridges, or electrical grids, are long overdue for overhauls). These fields are all far less volatile than, say, the gaming industry.

Certainly people change jobs a lot more these days. Since there is less job security now, there’s less incentive to stick with a company if it’s not that great for you. I’m not arguing things aren’t worse, all I’m saying is there is still job security to be found in certain areas/companies/countries/whatever. It’s not nonexistent, but it’s not all like short-term software cycle development, which is what the gaming software industry is. Get into something more bureaucratic, and things move a lot slower.

And certainly luck plays a large part.

Guy – not sure about the situation in Germany, but certainly in France all the laws restricting firing of staff have had an effect: companies are reluctant to hire people in the first place on anything other than short term contracts (which are exempt from said laws). Net result is that while older French workers have great job security, an awful lot of young people cannot get any kind of decent job at all, and this was a major cause of rioting a couple of years back.

Anglo-saxon model = moderate insecurity and suckage for everybody.
(continental) European model = good news for some and a royal screwing over for others.

Matter of personal preference which system you think is worse.

@Tremayne: I do prefer a more flexible system, as long as there is credible opportunity for retraining should an entire industry’s labour pool suddenly become outdated.

Germany has managed to avoid the increasing unemployment that has hit the US, despite also being hit by the economic crisis, in part thanks to its pro-employment laws.

I’m well aware of the downsides in the French model, not just to those who get screwed by it, but also to the quality of the service provided by people who can’t be punished, or by the inflexibility of people who don’t want to cross lines at their employer that, being a life job, will screw them forever. (See, it’s even bad for those with lifetime jobs, and their customers… although less so than for those without good jobs.)

I actually did try to find some civil service work not too long ago.

You know how they used to have a civil service exam you take to determine placement?

They replaced it with a monster.com-like job board.

It’s a pretty handy method to ignore the majority of their applicants.