Black Box skates on despite Electronic Arts' layoffs

It’s been a tough year for video-game giant Electronic Arts, which reported a net loss of US$391 million in its latest quarterly earnings statement and is anticipating an overall loss at the end of its current fiscal year. But things have been doubly rough for EA Black Box, the local studio that develops the California-based company’s popular Need for Speed and Skate franchises.

Following the global economic meltdown, EA announced in December 2008 that it was moving Black Box from its facility in downtown Vancouver to the EA Canada campus in Burnaby. In January 2009, company-wide layoffs were instituted and hit the studio especially hard.

Jason DeLong, executive producer of the upcoming Skate 3, said his development team shrank by 30 percent. “It was an extra-stinging wound,” DeLong told the Georgia Straight by phone from Burnaby, “because the day the reduction happened was the day our game [Skate 2] got released—to amazing reviews.”

Needless to say, there wasn’t a lot of celebrating that day. In total, EA shed 1,000 employees, or 10 percent of its work force. As for why Black Box was hit so hard by the job cuts, DeLong has no answer. “At the end of the day, these decisions aren’t personal,” he said. “They’re based on business.”

In an effort to further streamline operations and reduce costs, EA announced another round of layoffs in November 2009, this one eliminating about 1,500 jobs.

According to DeLong, while Black Box was affected by the November announcement, the Skate team “didn’t lose anybody specifically”. But, he added, “Wounds take a long time to heal, and I know for a fact that people are thinking, ”˜When Skate 2 was finished people got let go, so is that going to happen with us on Skate 3?’ ”

Having joined the company in 1997 as a quality-assurance tester, DeLong has spent his entire career with EA. He was assigned to Black Box after EA acquired the developer in 2002, and he was part of the group initially tasked with coming up with a skateboarding game.

The move to Burnaby required some adjustment on the part of Black Box employees, who were used to working in downtown Vancouver, DeLong said, but aside from that, little has changed. Black Box staff now work in a dedicated area of the campus that is labelled with the studio logo. “It was just a geographic move; it wasn’t a culture move,” DeLong said. “We were still keeping our Black Box culture.”¦We moved addresses, but we didn’t move who we are.”

DeLong had just become executive producer of the Skate franchise when the first layoffs were announced a year ago. “It was very hard for us to want to try and celebrate that we’d had an amazing success with a game that was selling better than its predecessor and was getting amazing critical reviews,” he said.

To make matters worse, the team was quickly moving into the development stage of Skate 3. DeLong rallied those left standing by offering them a chance to play a bigger role. “For the first week, all we did was go into brainstorming groups”¦and everybody got involved in the creation and the design of the game.”

Two features will distinguish Skate 3 from previous games in the series. First, the game aspires to be more accessible to people who aren’t hard-core gamers or skaters. “Everyone can skate,” DeLong said. “It’s easy to do. Step on a board and push forward. It’s fun.”

The other improvement, DeLong explained, is that Skate 3 is all about teamwork. The structure of the game encourages gamers to play with friends, in order to form teams that can skate together and compete against other teams. “Whether that was deliberate or not, I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we kind of all got together and rallied around this concept as a group,” he
said, “after we had gone through some tough times.”

A year after the layoffs hit, and despite some major challenges, the Skate team at Black Box is entering the home stretch of its latest game. Skate 3 is slated for release in May. DeLong credits the developers with how well it’s turning out.

“At the end of the day, it’s their passion, and the fact that they want to make a great game makes my job pretty easy,” he said. “Because all they want to do is do the best they can to make an amazing title.”