There's a rumour going around that EA's actually gotten off their lazy asses and is working on a patch for Zero Hour. It's second-hand information, but if it actually did come from Harvard Bonin it's probably true.

If they'd actually come out with this, oh, about six months ago, I'd have been a happy camper. Unfortunately for them, they've f*cked up their karma so much since the last ZH patch that this non-announcement has to be greeted with a heaping tablespoon of skepticism. Hell, they could put a big splash page announcing it on EA.com's front door and I still wouldn't believe it. Even if it is true, it should be very obvious to everyone that this is a PR initiative in advance of Red Alert 3.

OTOH, maybe Havok, Ace and I can finally have some online ZH multiplayer games again.

Yeah, I know, I've been slacking. Between work and Champions of Norrath, I've been neglecting the site. But I'm here now, to catch up on the backlog of EA-related news.

I mentioned the layoffs and the increased profits in the last post, so that's off my plate for now.

Empire at War
All you Westwood Studios fans (myself included) have reason to celebrate. No, I'm not talking about the announcement of Red Alert 3, I'm talking about the announcement of LucasArts' Empire at War, developed by Petroglyph. It looks like by the fall, we should have two things we never thought we'd see: a new RTS game from Westwood Studios and a Star Wars game that doesn't suck! (Okay, I take it back. KotOR didn't suck.)

Funny how the announcement of Red Alert 3 came just before the announcement of Empire at War. It's like someone at EA heard about it through the grapevine and said, "Oh, shit! This is going to pull all the C&C fans away from us! Quick, we need something to focus their attention on us! I know, we'll announce Red Alert 3! I know we're not working on it, but we can just throw a new skin on Generals and bang something out in a few months! Hey, it works for Madden! Look guys, shiny! Pay no attention to the game company made up of former Westwood staffers!"

Now I'll be the first one to admit, I can be pretty easily hooked by slapping a "Command & Conquer" logo on something (although I did manage to avoid the Sole Survivor disaster), so I'm going to be hard pressed to give this one up. Especially if the reviews come back positive. But I'm going to do my damndest. I'm also going to pick up Empire at War, no matter what the reviews say, and do my best to support Petroglyph. I hope everyone who's pissed off at EA will do the same.

NFL
EA announced last month that they had signed a five-year exclusive agreement with the NFL and NFLPA making them the sole producer of NFL-branded games. Looks like they couldn't stand the competition so they threw money at the problem until it went away.

Then they followed it up with an exclusive deal with the Arena Football League. Does anybody really believe that they think an AFL game is going to sell worth a damn? No way, they just want to make sure nobody else can make a video game featuring a professional football league. (Except the CFL, and nobody in the States would buy that!)

And to top it off they signed a 15-year exclusive deal with ESPN, to make sure that any competitors can't gain credibility through the ESPN brand, for any sports game.

Nothing illegal about what they did, of course. Hey, it's a great corporate strategy, to force out the competition. But given EA's recent history, I think we all know that this means that Maddens 2006 through 2011 are all going to be the same game with a few tweaks, an updated roster, and now an ESPN logo.

Ubisoft
Also at the end of December, EA announced that they were buying a minority stake in France's Ubisoft Entertainment, developers of such games as Ghost Recon, Prince of Persia, and the Tom Clancy series (Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six, etc.). If the deal is approved by the good folks over at the DoJ, they'll have about a 20% stake in the company, ahead of even the founders of the company, the Guillemot brothers. Ubisoft is treating this as a hostile action. Based on EA's history of taking over small companies with popular intellectual property then using that popularity to fire off sub-par games that are guaranteed best sellers just because of the name, I don't blame them one bit. Infogrames Entertainment S.A. (a.k.a. Atari, Inc.), another French company, has pledged to keep Ubisoft out of EA's gaping maw, up to and including a merger, and apparently has the backing of the French government to do it. Here's hoping they're successful; it would be a shame to see another promising development house go the way of Bullfrog, Origin, or Westwood. Meanwhile, Ubisoft has to work with a virtual Sword of Damocles over their heads. One wrong move and EA might finish them off.

The Strangulation of the Sports Game Continues
Take 2 Interactive (publishers of, among other things, ESPN NFL 2K5) announced they had signed an exclusive deal with the MLBPA for baseball games on the next-generation Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft game consoles. So no, this isn't directly related to EA, but would they have felt the need to make such a deal if EA hadn't just screwed them out of both the NFL and ESPN games? With all these exclusive deals flying about (EA already has NASCAR, the AFL, and others, and rest assured, there will be more) there is quickly becoming less and less competition in the sports game world. With less competition, the games will stagnate and that means that the only people who lose out on these deals will be the fans.


EA's current corporate climate can be best summed up by an omission from "Rusty" Reuff's memo: He said that EA's goal was to become the biggest entertainment software company in the world. He didn't mention anything about them being the best entertainment software company in the world.

Surprise, surprise. Two months after promising to fix the problems everyone's been talking about, EA has instead layed off 60 people from EA Los Angeles, at the same time as they announced how much their profits were up over last year. Anyone care to lay odds that the people gone are the ones who complained most? EA's just given notice to their employees to shut up and like it.

So Kotaku has gotten a hold of an internal EA memo written by EA's Executive Vice President Human Resources Russel "Rusty" Rueff. In it, he admits that there are problems with EA's employment policies, as detailed by ea_spouse and Joe Straitiff, and confirmed by many others.

He's also promised that EA will start thinking about maybe doing something, in the fiscal new year. That's April of next year, for anyone who doesn't work in or near the finance department.

Will be interesting to see if anything actually happens, or if this is just HR trying to quell the revolution. Given that HR's job is to keep employees quiet at the lowest possible cost, I'm betting on the latter.

The New York Times (thankfully reprinted by CNET News.com) is reporting that IBM is getting out of the PC business. Wow, end of an era.

ZDNet Australia has a quick article about EA's practices, with quotes from Joe Straitiff, and Jason Della Roca of the International Game Developers Association. I wouldn't normally post a link to the New York Times, what with their "free registration required" (translation: sign up for spam) bullshit, but apparently this article is about EA. BugMeNot. I haven't read it, so I'm taking Lockergnome's word on it.

Meanwhile, ea_spouse's post that started the whole thing is up over 3000 comments, while Joe Straitiff's comments are up to seven pages.

Just doing my part to keep people informed. SnarkySpot continues to be the place to go for comprehensive coverage.

Not my boycott, but the fallout from ea_spouse and Joe Straitiff's posts is spreading to encompass other games producers with similar "management styles". (I use quotes around "management styles" because what they're doing isn't management. I know, I'm a manager.) Atari in particular is being pointed to as another company that works on constant "crunch time" like EA.

The International Game Developers Association (I think you can figure out what they do just from their name) has issued an open letter calling on game developers to take responsibility for quality of life issues in the games industry. In it, they point out developers who look after their employees, including BioWare (Baldur's Gate series, Neverwinter Nights series, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic), Firaxis (Civilization III series, Alpha Centauri series, Sid Meier's Pirates!), Team17 (Worms series), Blue Fang (Zoo Tycoon series), Cyberlore (MechWarrior series, Majesty series, Risk, Playboy: The Mansion [boy, that team had a tough job, eh?]), and Ensemble (Age of Empires series, Age of Mythology). Those are just some of the companies we should be buying from.

CNET has picked up the story and is really running with it.

Looks like ea_spouse's post is generating quite a bit of discussion. Slashdot and CNET News.com, among others, have picked it up. George Broussard of 3D Realms piped in with his comments. (Hey George, shouldn't you be working on Duke Nukem Whenever?) The blogosphere's having a field day with it, too, including this post from an ex-EA-via-Maxis employee named Joe Straitiff who was fired for refusing to work EA's insane hours. SnarkySpot's tracking the ongoing reaction to the post and other related posts and articles. There is also a pending class-action lawsuit by EA's own employees over EA's overtime policies, too. Kotaku (the site for obsessive gamers who have no life) also has an article on the lawsuit.

Stop supporting EA and the way they treat their employees! You don't need to play NHL 2005 that badly! (Sega's ESPN games are better, anyways.) If you think you really do need to play something of theirs that badly, wait a few months for it to show up in the used games section at your local EB, when you can buy it without EA getting any money for it!