EA confirms layoffs, 'disappointed' with holiday sales

by Ross Miller on Dec 9th 2008 4:55PM

Confirming what analysts had said yesterday, Electronic Arts has announced that it is "continuing to pursue cost saving initiatives including a reduction of its product portfolio for fiscal year 2010 with additional associated headcount reductions and facility consolidations" -- or, simply put, that more layoffs are on the way.

More directly, CEO John Riccitiello said that it was "disappointed that our holiday slate is not meeting our sales expectations" while noting that there was a "significant improvement in overall quality." EA has a conference call set for 5:00PM ET today.

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Tags: breakingnews, ea, electronic-arts, js-twitter, layoffs

Reader Comments (57)

And this is why we can't have nice new games like Dead Space and Mirrors Edge......

http://dump.sonuku.com/blog/2008/06/arguecat.png

What, because EA marketing executives are a bunch of idiots? I guarantee you that Mirror's Edge is profitable. The problem is, they projected sales of 3 MILLION UNITS for Mirror's Edge:

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/09/24/mirrors-edge-dev-projects-3m-units-sold-worldwide/

Three million units is Gears of War 2 numbers. Not the numbers for a new franchise featuring a creative but flawed first-person platformer that isn't newb-friendly enough to appeal to the casual base.

If EA built their financial plans around a projection that Mirror's Edge would move 3 million units, and then has to cut costs when the game 'underperforms', who does that reflect poorly on?

They need to make a sequel to Mirror's Edge, but give Faith a gun and much, much bigger breasts that you can see bouncing up and down at the bottom of the screen when you run.
That should get them to at least 2 million copies.

I don't want to be shallow but faith is pretty ugly and I found the title a little pretentious but it end up being lame instead. ( with terrible lines)

it's ok, i'm 'disappointed' with the EA holiday line up.

I actually really liked their holiday lineup, still play dead space and mirror's edge is decent, and RB2 is AWESOME. I think you're talking about Activision.

From now on game devs should include a crappy collection of minigames it took about a week to make with every high quality release.

That way gamers get what they want, and knuckle draggers get what they want but still support real game development.

Example:

Coming next November: DeadSpace 2, the sequel to the critically acclaimed 3rd person adventure shooter released last year. Also includes "Swing your arms as fast as you can". Warning the developers of "Swing your arm" are not responsible for injury caused by your dumb ass playing the game.

Yeah, let's blame casual gamers for not buying hardcore games instead of hardcore gamers. That makes perfect logical sense.

knuckledragger

As soon as they start focusing on quality, this happens.

Bah.

Quality isn't a six-month process. Mirror's Edge and Dead Space are good first starts in getting new creative franchises off of the ground, but neither of these games are GOTY contenders.

The market has already shown that it will amply reward developers like Blizzard, Valve, and Harmonix that commit to high quality standards over a period of years. EA is going to have to go at it for a while, and keep getting better.

@copa

Really? Dead Space isn't a GOTY contender? You are sadly mistaken imho sir.

@Mohulis

Dead still isn't a contender. I had high hopes for that game but after playing through it four times, I realized that it didn't have enough content to make it as fun as (in its genre) RE4 for example. My idea of a contender for GOTY is either Fallout 3 or GOW2.

Oops forgot the *Space

I feel like the weak holiday sales had to be expected. I don't know why it was such a big surprise.

Too little to late - I surprised myself how many ea games i bought this year. But they burned us on Tiger and Hockey again this year with poor online performance and game stoppping glitches. Many of my friends will not touch the EA logo with a ten foot pole......

did anyone really think mirrors edge had a chance?
its a darn parkour game people...

why didnt EA also make a brazilian dance/fighting style game, i forgot the name of the dance....

sorry people that liked mirrors edge, it was not worthy of a $ 60 price tag and should have never been made IMO.

Can't believe I'm going to agree with you but after having Joystiq build up Mirror's Edge I moved it up in my play list only to discover that I did not agree with their opinion of the game.

Bad Combat, Poor Collision detection, Bland level design. If it weren't for the stylization of the universe I don't think anyone would have been fooled by this. I give it props though for making my feet tingle, but I get the same feeling when I play Tombraider and the environments are far more interesting in tomb raider.

Still, I would say its worth a rental though...and like you say, maybe a $39.99 price tag.

Capoeira.

Yeah, I regret buying Mirror's Edge. I still think it was a cool idea for a game, though.

With the state of the economy and our media's tendency to drive fear, It's no wonder the numbers aren't meeting expectations. This is a sad case indeed, and EA deserves much better for the work they've done.

Hopefully the only damage done, besides layoffs, is a few fewer titles released. We'd all hate to see a return to Shovelware EA.

Maybe EA will realize that while rebuilding their image takes time, so does Activisions-Blizzard-whores running theirs into the ground. Stick with EA, please, you are doing all the right things.

Here's an idea EA (and the rest of the industry)... release games year round, not just in October-November. Thanks.

Agreed. So many games that would have just gotten lost in the shuffle could actually be appreciated if they spaced their releases out better...

Agreed as well.

I think holding off Mirror's Edge for a DECEMBER release would've been a better call, as there is next to NOTHING worthwhile coming out. Would've been great to have it NOT COMPETING AGAINST ANYTHING ELSE.

Oh well, it's only EA's loss. There's gonna be a sequel and that's all I care about.

That's all well and good in theory, but the holidays are the peak time for game sales. Naturally publishers want to have their big titles out in time for Christmas shopping to try and take as large of a percentage of those sales from the competition as they can. Video game sales just aren't good enough year-round for all the publishers to be releasing hot titles year-round.

Note: The information used in writing this post was pulled almost entirely from betwixt my buttocks.

Mirror's Edge, in February, with no competition, would have sold more units. I have no doubt about that. It would have been on it's own, more press, more hype...

I understand what you're saying, and I wish more publishers would release hot titles in months that don't end in '-ber'. However, I don't think other releases hurt the sales of Mirror's Edge too terribly bad.

The game is fun, but it really isn't much more than a niche platform game game. Parkour isn't exactly all the rage, and platformers tend to really on cute likeable mascots. As a first-person parkour platform game, Mirror's Edge is fighting an uphill battle from the word 'go'.

I can't imagine the game having impressive numbers whether it had been released in November or February. In all honesty, it's not very accessible to casual gamers; it's too short to warrant a purchase over a rental for many frugal gamers, and the entire universe/concept seems a bit too abstract.

I'm about halfway through the game, and I don't dispute that it is a fun little diversion. However, nothing about the game grabs me and makes me want to actually own it rather than just rent.

This is sad. I feel sorry for the employees getting laid off. I got laid off the first of December from my job so I know how they feel.

"Shovelware EA" and "Buy and then screw up the studio" EA is exactly how they got here - too bad after they turned around it will continue to hurt them for a bit still. Heck people still haven't forgiven them for Origin....

It just show activision never listen to gamers we are assholes, we criticize you because you only make sequels and sequels and when you decided to give us new ips we won't buy it, why you say? because we are assholes.

Congratulations, gamers. You finally get your new series that try different things and you all proceed to roundly ignore them...as always.

Oh well. At least I didn't have any interest/emotional stake in any of the games in question...unlike Okami, which still hurts my soul to this very day.

To be fair... do you really blame people for being skeptical about a new EA franchise? I know I was. Just seeing EA's logo slapped on a game that looked cool had me cringing. I finally gave Dead Space a shot when it went down to $30 at Target on Black Friday and holy hell am I impressed. There are so many games that I have to play right now but they all seem to pale in comparison to Dead Space. I'll be playing (and re-playing) this one for a LONG time.

Is it enough to just try new things? Perhaps they aren't trying the right kind of new things.

I told my girlfriend I wanted to try new things to spice up our love life. I came home from work two nights ago, and there she was dressed in full football pads (American football for the folks across the pond). She spear tackled me, stepped on my balls with her cleats, and then violated me in the shower while screaming out "BLUE 42! BLUE 42!"

I had to commend her for trying new things, but it was not exactly what I had in mind. I mean, the stepping on the balls thing was cool, but the shoulder pads and helmet were a bit too much.

Dear EA,

Stop wasting so much money on DRM schemes.

Consumer

PS Stop wasting even more money on 'fixing' those DRM schemes with a different DRM scheme.

Oh, boy, sorry, answered the wrong post "capoeira" is ans answer to sk8monroe, about the brazilian fight.

Anyway, all the hopes on Sims 3 now... a game that can unite both casuals and hardcore gamers.

They said that about Animal Crossing, too, but hardcore gamers turned on that series as soon as it suited the casual-hating agenda.

I guess you shouldn't cripple your software with DRM.

I would have bought Dead Space, Crysis Warhead, Red Alert 3, and possibly even Spore on the PC.

Too bad I spent the money on COD:WAW, a few XB360 games, Sins of a Solar Empire, and Left4Dead.

Maybe the fact that even your crown jewel became the most pirated game of 2008 might make you take that money you are giving away to Sony and invest it in game quality. You aren't alone though, Take 2, Ubisoft, and Bethesda have a lot to learn too.

I hope you all figure out your mistakes sooner than later. Maybe take a look at how Stardock is doing things. A simple CD Key should be enough protection if you do things right.

You actually have to pay for stardock?

I didn't buy any EA games. Partly because I didn't want to spend my PC gaming budget on games with securom, and my console gaming budget basically went towards Gears 2 and some arcade games. When it comes to PC, EA needs to stock screwing the consumer, and as for console sales, November is not the only month you can launch a game. Over the summer I was starved for a good game and would have picked up many of the titles I won't even consider right now. There's simply too much competition in november and most gamers can't buy all their games at once.

it's not Dead Space or Mirrors Edge fault, it's SPORE fault.

...so people don't think that the economy, and peoples fear, leads them to shy from buying $60 games a bit? I own a lot of games, but as I see different company layoffs I get scared that I don't have enough money saved to weather a bad storm. I'm in what's called a recession proof field and I feel that way. I think that EA is just suffering from the problems that are hitting all the businesses.

Agreed. We knew we had massive layoffs in our company so personally I have only bought 1 out of the 10 I was originally planning to buy in the last couple of months. And I'll be only buying 2 in the forseeable future.

I think it's a combination of all thing I'm seeing mentioned: over optimistic forcasts for new IPs, bad economy, DRM on their PC games, and trying to release all too many games in the holiday season (which combined with the bad economy is a double whammy).

Thank god they laid off all those people so they could throw a swanky christmas party.

http://jeff-greenspeak.blogspot.com/2008/12/happy-monday.html

All these layoffs are starting to scare me. Lets hope EA stays strong.

I would like to recall attention to the fact that they projected way higher sales figures, and that these games are on track for decent sales, certainly nothing discouraging

How about the gaming industry stop trying to cram games down our throats in October and November? I would've bought Mirror's Edge or Dead Space back in September, but now? Sorry, but these two games came out in a five week span that included Fallout 3, Gears 2, Call of Duty, Fable 2, and Left4Dead and these two EA games. Mirror's Edge and Dead Space fell by the wayside. So did Left 4 Dead to a lesser extent. I'm sure Dead Space and Mirror's Edge would have sold way more during a slower season.

Maybe if they made a Need for Speed game that didn't cling to the Fast and the Furious fad, I would have bought it.

I picked Midnight Club LA over NFS Undercover, and I don't regret that decision...

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EA confirms layoffs, 'disappointed' with holiday sales

Reader Comments (57)

Posted: Dec 9th 2008 4:58PM Ficken said

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