I'm sorry to see this happen.
I always feel so crappy for the people who get canned like this.
RJT said:
Can't DICE be hit by their relatively unsuccessful new project (Mirror's Edge)?
Cost overruns/delays/cancellations are worse than a single underperforming project. Battlefield has been a consistent huge success, with 1943 just the most recent example and Bad Company 2 sure to do quite well also.
Stoney Mason said:
I doubt you'll be seeing another Mirror's Edge though unless it has a crazy smallish budget which seems kind of unlikely.
Our previous understanding was that they were basically hoping to pull off a cost-reducing ME2 reusing the engine and many assets, which I think is probably a better strategy than abandoning it.
Y2Kev said:
Stump basically captures what I would have replied, but I'll just restate: the number of EA teams that are unproductive far exceeds what should be considered reasonable. Most products at EA are succeeding. I can only think of a few bombs, and then you have those performing in line with expectations on a year to year basis. The company is just entirely too large.
Right.
EA's structure now is a remnant of excessive, unguided expansion for years combined with a poor companywide vision for acquisition integration. They bought tons of independent studios, moved them around geographically, took the franchises and genres that made them successful away from them, gutted them, and filled in their shells with new unproven teams without actually coming up with a companywide vision for development: these types of games go here, this stuff gets made by these guys, etc.
What EA really needs is focused teams that have specific areas of expertise,
don't have major redundancies, and can ship things on their target platform with some degree of consistency, and that's precisely what they don't have right now.
Opiate said:
The obvious problem with this is that today's success is tomorrow's fat.
You correctly identify the reason that every company can't just live on a strategy of firing every team that underperforms, but that isn't necessarily relevant -- it only matters whether EA has
too many teams that underperform and (more specifically)
too many teams which are structurally positioned to underperform.
What a big developer-publisher like EA needs to really do is figure out a set of core competencies: what types do we make internally, how do we approach making them, what does making these games do for our overall company vision? When you have a team who fills a specific, concrete role effectively (Bioware Alberta -> large-scale RPGs with consistent 1m+ sales, Tiberon -> annual sports) it's worth keeping them around and doing maintenance work on them even during rough patches, but many of EA's studios have little in specific to say "this team needs to stay together because they're good at
X."
I think a company structured like EA has to expect a certain amount of constant churn (studio closings, mergers, relocations, or restructurings), but if they're running things well then enough of their total studios would be operating above the bare-minimum bar that they can afford to focus on one particular underachiever at a time. At the moment, though, EA only really has four "strong" studios (Visceral, Bioware, DICE, and Tiburon.)