EA公布战略调整并关闭BioWare

Electronic Arts has today announced a broad number of changes, as it concentrates on its biggest franchises, cancels some in development projects and closes legendary studio Bioware.

In an announcement published today over on the official EA Website, the publisher outlined a sweeping change in strategy as it concentrates “teams, technology, and investment” behind “three strategic priorities.” Per EA:

• Deepen Our Core: Our greatest opportunity starts with our franchises and global communities that have made EA a leader in interactive entertainment. This is where we’ve had to make our hardest choices. Saying no to some things we’re passionate about allows us to focus our teams and resources so we give our biggest opportunities everything they need to succeed.
• Expand Our Reach: The strength of our core business creates an enormous opportunity to reach more players across new platforms, markets, and business models.  As one example, in regions as dynamic as Asia, success means building experiences that reflect local players, cultures, and expectations.
• Transform Our Business: We believe we can use our experience building interactive entertainment, together with our relationships in sports, to create entirely new ways for fans to engage with the teams, athletes and sports they love. These will be disciplined investments that only scale when they demonstrate real potential.

As part of the communication sent to all staff, EA also detailed the choices being made across their game portfolio, across shooters, action adventure titles and of course EA Sports.

The two biggest pieces of news focus around studios, with Respawn and DICE coming together to “collaborate on a future project” which is heavily rumoured to be a new Star Wars Battlefront game in partnership with Disney/Lucasfilm Games.

The other big piece of news is the closure of legendary developer Bioware after 31 years, and the cancellation of the next Mass Effect. Per EA, “We’ve made the decision not to move forward with this development, which means we’re closing the studio and our Edmonton workspace. BioWare is a legendary studio that helped define the role-playing genre, and we do not take this decision lightly.” These new changes at EA also see the loss of over 400 roles.

Of course, this announcement comes on the back of Electronic Arts sale for $55 Billion to PIF, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners earlier this year. The deal, originally announced back in September of last year, was approved by EA stockholders and was swiftly approved across various regulatory bodies. As part of the agreement, the publisher inherited $20Billion in debt as part of the loan needed to fill in the total purchase gap, which many thought would lead to further layoffs and a lack of support for more risk-averse projects.

Indeed, the saddest part is we all saw this coming.

How do you feel about these changes at EA? Let us know in the comments below!

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