EA Employee Agitates "Unfair Treatment" of Mythic Entertainment

[Jeremiah]

A blogger who refers to himself as "EA Louse" has scintillatingly dismissed and denounced EA for what he calls "a coup" of his company. The Louse accuses EA of outsourcing and eliminating the jobs in subsidiary companies.

In a blog titled " Why Warhammer Failed", the EA Louse raises major concerns regarding EA's treatment of the company. EA installed a producer known as Jeff Hickman on the project, who the Louse calls "...the saddest [example] of a [game] producer..." that he had ever encountered. The Louse claims that incompatible staffers such as Hickman were the chief reasons for the Warhammer Online project demise, and the evident and fast-oncoming "demise" of Mythic.

A stale and sectionalized incumbency combined with outsourced and distant developers and artists has purportedly made Mythic into something of a train-wreck. The EA Louse blames a poor chain of command and a lack of interest from his superiors, who refused to speak to the founders of the company regarding new business direction, and assumed to speak for them without actually doing so.

Mythic has fast become an example of a poorly-run subsidiary studio of a large software publisher. Like Ubisoft, EA has created entire new departments of their company, unloading their local units to outsource cheaper work to foreign artists and code monkeys. This is not a situation echoed by the Activision-Blizzard merger. It is widely accepted by economics that Blizzard buffed Activision from capsizing. With steadily decreasing profits from the "Rhythm Game" phenomenal quasi-bubble, Activision has yet to prove that they can individually generate as much revenue as compared to Blizzard's quarterly draw. Activision has been "...riding World of Warcraft out of the recession", according to the Wall Street Journal's recent analysis of the company merger.

EA appears to be riding Mythic into the ground. At least they can salvage whatever is left of the company's Warhammer Online product by creating new content patches. It appears that with the upcoming large layoffs that the majority of Warhammer Online's needs will be provided by outsourced, third-party developers or likely Asian subsidiaries and units of EA international.

Who is to blame here? Can we place the blame on EA as a whole, on the failed marketing campaigns helmed by Eugene Evans, by the promised-yet-unfulfilled visions of the eccentric Paul Barnett, or perhaps Mythic's own lackadaisical and pre-existing hierarchy?