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Radioactive IT EA drops Pandemic
Radioactive IT EA drops Pandemic | EA drops Pandemic |
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| by Mike Bantick | |
| Thursday, 15 January 2009 | |
      
It is still to be confirmed, but sources over at Kotaku say that Electronic Arts have decided to shutdown long-time Australian development studio Pandemic, including studios in Brisbane and the U.S. From Battlezone II and Dark Reign II through a couple of iterations of Star Wars Battlefront and Destroy All Humans, Pandemic has been more recently linked to titles such as Mercenaries 2: World in Flames and the plumb licensing of Lord of The Rings, with the Dynasty Warriors like Conquest. EA picked up Pandemic in 2007 along with Bioware Corp and the studio has been supposedly working on an “open world reality show” game for the Wii entitled The Next Big Thing. But it seems it is non appearance of a movie tie-in The Dark Knight game that has incurred the wrath of EA – to the tune of over US$100 million. According to a report over at Gamasutra, EA spokesperson Mariam Sughayer says the company's currently not commenting any further beyond its previously-announced reduction initiatives until its February earnings call. "In December, EA announced a cost reduction initiative that will impact facilities and headcount," Sughayer said in a statement. "We do not expect to make any more public announcements until our earnings call in early February." "Outside of our scheduled earnings call, we aren’t providing any new information on the status of individual facilities." This mirrors comments to iTWire today by local Australian EA representatives who are yet to clarify the situation, treating the issue as pure speculation at this point. However, the Gamasutra report does include details from a former programmer at Pandemic, Tony Albrecht who mentions that there have indeed been layoffs at the Australian studio. |
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