Thursday, October 14, 2010

EA Louse, etc.

It doesn't matter whether EA Louse is real or not, because real bonafide actual artists experience this every day. Here's the most thoughtful discussion of it you'll find on the internet, by actual industry artists: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=77465

Now, why isn't Gamasutra or Kotaku talking about this? Mandate from EA not to talk about it? Not enough "facts"? (That's never stopped either site before.) There's so much to cover here that it's mind-boggling:
  • Outsourcing in the game industry -- inevitable, IMO, the jab at EA Shanghai strikes me as a little racist, and not the "fun" kind of racist either
  • The nature of upper-level management in the industry, still a boy's club
  • Work cultures at certain developers, expectations of voluntary overtime
  • Auteurism in the industry, is David Jaffe right?
  • The boom and bust cycle in the industry
  • Workers' rights in the industry, unionization?
  • Profitability at EA vs. profitability elsewhere; Warhammer had 300K 150K subs (with no advertising at all) and it was a "total failure" while Eve has 200K (?) subs and it's funding 2 more games and continued operations at CCP.
... all these issues, and there's more or less a media blackout on it, it seems? I mean, I hope they're just waiting to get something comprehensive on this, because the total silence is deafening. Is this the state of games journalism today?