Friday, December 12, 2008

Trying to understand the economy!

Gamespot has an article on how EA is expected to do another round of layoffs, to which I say why? Before any one answers that, let me at least explain why I am asking.

It seems that all this year developers and publishers have been laying off some of it's workforce, but it's not all that uncommon in the gaming industry. But even with the tough times, it seemed that the gaming industry was above the current crisis. But with regards to EA, they have published some successful titles this year; Spore, Dead Space, Warhammer Online, Red Alert 3 just to name a few. So why more cut backs then?

Well the end of the article states that EA is also scaling back its SKU count. So I guess to answer my own question, it seems that EA expanded to quickly, released crap like Mirror's Edge or unfinished product like Warhammer Online, and realised they had way more projects in the works than they could support. So the down sizing of IP's is the main reason it would seem to the next round of lay offs, which is very unfortunate.

There's not much that hasn't been affected by the economic crisis this year. But maybe in the long term the gaming industry will gain from all this, maybe companies like EA will realize that having a lot of SKU's is not what makes you successful, but maybe having fewer high quality SKU's will make a company successful, and profitable. I think we would all benefit from that.

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