The Chop: Jobs, Franchises Could Disappear at EA, Says Analyst

EA should perhaps consider cutting down on management types (they have far to many of those apparently), that would save them far more money than dropping franchises with good potential and the developers that go with it. Those earn most of the salaries anyway, devs are notoriously underpayed for the great work they do.

Mirror's Edge was a great concept, but not executed well, the same goes for many other recent new things EA tried.

Dead Space could have been so much better if they got the atmosphere and tension right, as it is now, you know stuff is going to jump out at you whenever a light flikkers...
They can really learn something from the asian style horror games there, not so much startle the player like most US "horror" games do, but make them feel that their character is alone and scared. Let them feel the tension, startling the players gets very old very quickly.
As for the racing games, there are to many of them on the market and they're pretty samey as it is.

The only problem with Mirror's Edge is they didn't make it a sports title. Imagine if instead of Tony Hawk being a level by level game with challenges to complete in each section, they'd made up some crazy story that tried to legitimise skating across levels, performing tricks and making gaps to keep momentum, then gone and made the only requirement of actually completing the levels getting from the start to the finish, regardless of how many tricks you pulled, how fast you were, etc.

It would suck.

DICE built this great game mechanic and if you read any of the reviews they will all say it: The Time Trials are where the fun is. It's not fun to try and beat up swat guys in this game. It's not fun to die over and over because you don't know where to go on your first run. It's not fun to have the only real objective being "Get to the end" so you're ALWAYS on your first run. But the game is kick ass awesome when you sit down in those Time Trials and start to beat your best time until you finally score those 3 star ratings. The announced DLC has no expansion of the pitiful story. It's abstract boxes in the sky for players to jump all over. More Time Trial wickedness.

I do not understand why they made up some BS story about a Big Brother society to try to legitimise running around on rooftops all day because the concept doesn't work, the story isn't explored, and running through a level once then moving on is the antithesis of what makes this game fun. It kinda burns me when people say it's too short, because now I'm playing Prince of Persia, which has eaten up 8 hours of my time and I'm 1/4 of the way through, yet it's repetitive to the max and every level is intensely linear. There are almost no alternate routes anywhere.

I feel DICE have shot themselves in the foot on ME, because they totally had it. You can see it when you play the game. They just royally screwed themselves and if ME gets dropped and nobody steps up to make another game like it, it's a huge waste.

Mirror's Edge was somewhat of an experiment, so I can see why the game tried to emphazise experience much more than longevity. The time trials, while not substantial, give you a bit of something to do. DICE has the controls down pat, now it's time to put that in something that can give you more to do. The game was born out of a Battlefield project- an online multiplayer parkour game would sound sweet.

Mirrors Edge not meeting sales targets? Funny that, I thought peole would be stampeding to pay $60 for a 5 hour long game.

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I LIKE the fence. I get 2 groups to laugh at then.

With Rockband, there shouldn't make any more games in that series, just lots of song packs to download.