I'm astounded, though not surprised, by how EA is slowly collapsing.
To be fair, the studio is not just closing up shop and everyone being fired, but it is being consolidated with another studio in British Columbia. So the franchises will live on, and key staff will be given the chance to relocate... And probably just half of everybody will be fired.
Still... Need for Speed was not just one of EA's big franchises, but one of the biggest franchises in the industry just a few years ago. Its hard to think of a thing EA has done right with the franchise recently... They oversaturated it with yearly entries, without a good creative vision for any of the recent ones, and appear to have spent incredible sums of money to do so.
Here's a link to the actual press release:
http://news.ea.com/portal/site/ea/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&ndmConfigId=1012492&newsId=20081219005462&newsLang=en
"[Our former customers] are unable to find software which they WANT to play."
"The way to solve this problem lies in how to communicate what kind of games [they CAN play]."
Satoru Iwata, Nintendo President. Only slightly paraphrased.
