Hasta La Gadget!

At some point next year, EA will release The Sims 4 on PC and Mac. At least that’s what the Madden publisher is saying today alongside news of the game’s existence; it’s the fourth Sims title handled by the folks at EA Maxis (the same team behind SimCity and Spore, among others). Outside of the game’s existence and year-long launch window, EA isn’t offering much in the way of details — we’re taking a wild guess that you’ll once again be tasked with managing the lives of various sims in their day-to-day affairs. Of course, many folks will indulge their darker side, banishing sims to houses without doors and watching the virtual person’s descent into both madness and uncleanliness. Perhaps if their cries for help weren’t in simlish, it wouldn’t be so adorable (but we doubt it).

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Source: EA

Electronic Arts sent out an “organizational update” today notifying the public of another round of layoffs made by the game publisher. No specifics were mentioned, but it certainly seems that Electronic Arts is having some tough times, and a lot of re-organization is going on for the Redwood City-based company.

In the update on the company’s website, Electronic Arts notes that “in recent weeks, EA has aligned all elements of its organizational structure behind priorities in new technologies and mobile. This has led to some difficult decisions to reduce the workforce in some locations.” Again, no specifics, but we should hear come May 7 when the company announces fiscal year earnings.

According to Kotaku, it’s said that Electronic Arts has let go of as much as 10% of its workforce. The video game publisher didn’t comment on the headcount, but we’re guessing that 10% is about 1,000 employees, give or take a hundred or so. That’s certainly a lot of people, and that’s less people working on great games like The Sims and the Madden NFL series.

Electronic Arts has had a rough few months, however. The SimCity launch went exactly the opposite of what the company was expecting, and along with the SimCity fiasco mixed in with the DRM controversy, the publisher landed itself the “Worst Company in America” award for the second year in a row. Luckily, CEO John Riccitiello got out of there when he could.

Electronic Arts confirms more layoffs on the way is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

It has been announced that SimCity’s first major update will be released on the 22nd of April. The update brings a plethora of fixes as well as little tweaks that will make the user experience better. Electronic Arts says that “The wait will be worth it,” adding that after the update cities should process more properly and many of SimCity’s game processes, such as education, disasters, tourism etc will receive bug fixes. This update also brings the important fix for HUD in colorblind mode.

This update will require service downtime for a couple of hours, downtime begins from 4PM E.T. The company says that this particular time was chosen after reviewing peak playing hours. Despite receiving much criticism, SimCity has already sold over 1.3 million copies for PC since March, when it was initially launched. SimCity has been criticized a lot for its always-on DRM as well as it being plagued with issues immediately after its release. The entire list of changes that this new update brings is quite long, it can be viewed by clicking through the source link given below.

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After the whole fiasco with the release of SimCity earlier this year, it seems that things have finally settled, and players are now able to build their cities in peace. However, there’s going to be another server shutdown come Monday, but only to make room for the game’s first major update, which is set to hit April 22.

Electronic Arts has announced that the update will hit on Monday starting at 1 pm PT and will bring the game to version 2.0. It contains “a number of top-requested bug fixes and improvements,” but the publisher was kind enough to provide a massive list of everything that will be provided in the update.

Some of the more important updates address issues with tourists, delays in receiving invitations, and phantom audio problems. It will also provide color-corrects when in a colorblind mode in the HUD, and data maps will show the filtered color when a color filter is enabled, unless you’re in a colorblind mode.

Other than that, casinos will be more profitable, and there will be a slew of fixes to the game’s budget-based systems, including fire, garbage, and sewage. Public transit will also see a number of improvements, including a fix for that annoying infinite loop problem that some players have been experiencing.

SimCity getting first major update on April 22 is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Those of you were currently attempting to build a social media empire in Pet Society, The Sims Social and SimCity Social on Facebook can just stop playing those games right about now as EA has announced it will be pulling the plug for those titles on June 14. EA claims the reason for the closing of these three titles is due to each game failing to maintain a significant audience.

EA issued a statement to its fans in reference to the upcoming closure of Pet Society, The Sims Social and SimCity Social:

Today we are informing players of the difficult decision to retire some of our Facebook games: The Sims Social, SimCity Social and Pet Society.

After millions of people initially logged in to play these games, the number of players and amount of activity has fallen off. For people who have seen other recent shutdowns of social games, perhaps this is not surprising.

EA will continue to deliver popular titles for Facebook, most notably games from PopCap, including Bejeweled Blitz, Solitaire Blitz and the recently announced Plants vs. Zombies Adventures.

It’s interesting to see games published onto Facebook by EA haven’t been performing as well as PopCap published games. This just goes to show the EA-acquired company seems to know more about its social media audience better than EA does.

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