Following $275 million Playfish buyout, internal sources confirm "company-wide" staff cuts, including Skate, Madden, and Dante's Inferno devs.
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Electronic Arts is working with veteran developer American McGee on a new Alice game via EA Partners, CEO John Riccitiello said at DICE today. The original American McGee's Alice, a dark, gothic third person action take on Lewis Carroll's classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland fiction, came out on PC in 2000 -- also published and distributed by EA.
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While this lawsuit isn't very surprising considering the controversy Spore has been under for its DRM, it is a bit odd when you consider Spore is far from the first EA game to use SecuROM copy protection -- Mass Effect used the same software before it, and the recently released Crysis: Warhead (as well as the upcoming Red Alert 3) uses it as well.
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With another deadline in EA's takeover bid come and gone, the industry's #2 publisher isn't quitting and has reaffirmed it still wants to gobble up Take-Two by extending its $25.74 per share offer deadline to Aug 18. EA currently has only 15% of Take-Two's stock, which translates to 11,741,339 shares. Obviously, EA needs over half the shares to complete the takeover.
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EA Sports today announced its Wii-exclusive "All-Play" brand lineup: five familiar franchises with a new wrapping. The reason you might choose All-Play over the PS3 or 360 editions is the new casual focus that aims to appeal to, um, well, just about anyone with a few minutes to waste. Yes, that means minigames, but also simplified versions of the sports -- like 5-on-5 in Madden and optional All-Play control settings, which balance the playing field by going as far as to auto-control players.
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Peter Moore wants to change things at EA Sports. I mean, he wants to actually Change Things. Sports fans don’t like change. We like things the way they are. It’s time for Colin Campbell to go see this Moore fellow and find out what the hell is going on. Follow me fellas… “Our vision is to turn this from a videogame brand that is about sports to a sports brand that is about videogames.”
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Deutsche Bank's Jeetil Patel notes that market share declines at EA have been masked by Rock Band, and he thinks "EA's title slate lacks diversified quality."
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Electronic Arts has released a free downloadable feature called Online Team Play for NBA LIVE 08 that will enable 10 people on 10 different consoles anywhere in the world to connect online to play a single match. The new feature is automatically available for the PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system when connected online. It will be available on the Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system later this month.
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Electronic Arts celebrates aluminum anniversary of virtual life game by touting sales figures; franchise revenues total $2.5 billion. It has been 10 years to the day since The Sims originally arrived on PCs, where it met both critical acclaim and commercial success. Electronic Arts marked the occasion by dropping a fresh batch of statistics for perspective on just how successful the life sim series has been.
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It was mentioned only briefly during EA's conference call today, but it was enough to get us interested. While speaking of some more pie-in-the-sky plans EA have for the future of their sports brand, label boss Peter Moore said they were looking at instituting "subscription programs" for their titles, in order to "take advantage" of customer loyalty. Moore also said that future PC titles would "take advantage of online connectivity in a bigger and more meaningful way".
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