In the criminal pecking order, "Facebook games burglar" probably comes close to last. But that isn't stopping the Italian authorities from investigating the burglary of a virtual home belonging to a 44-year-old Facebook user living in Sicily.
'Tis the season to rush up layoffs so they don't fall in the sacrosanct Thanksgiving-to-Christmas period: An AOL insider tells us the company is slated to let go around 100 people tomorrow, following 1,500 firings Electronic Arts announced today.
Electronic Arts recently shut down Blueprint, a strategic project to enable the company to develop more software without onsite programmers. Coding Horror blogger Jeff Atwood is a professional programmer who lives in Berkeley. That makes him biased against cheap-outsourced-programer sites like Guru.com. But Atwood's …
No one knew exactly what the Blueprint division of videogame maker Electronic Arts was up to. Officially, it didn't exist. Now, it officially hasn't been shut down, but there's no one working on it. An ex-employee who blabbed to Variety tried to explain: Blueprint's dozen or so staff were charged with creating a way…
As they say in fashion: One day you are in, and the next day, you are out. And the same is true even for podcasting startups long after podcasting went out of style. Ron Bloom, cofounder of then Podshow, now Mevio, just touted the rollout of a site redesign on Monday. Now a tipster tells us that Bloom has been…
Will Wright's new videogame, Spore, allows buyers to install it on three computers at most, unless they buy another license. Copyright activists and just plain huffy consumers clogged Amazon.com with 2,000 one-star reviews for the game, based solely on the three-machines limit. Spore's maker, Redwood City-based…
Copyright crusaders are climbing over one another to denounce Will Wright's Spore from video game publisher Electronic Arts. Even the normally stable ZDNet warns Spore's three-install limit could kill PC gaming. Kill it! Meanwhile, the scientific-methody gang at Ars Technica decided to test the system. They hit…
Take-Two Interactive, the marketer of Grand Theft Auto and various sports videogames, has watched its stock price plummet to $16.99 on the news that Electronic Arts has decided to quit trying to buy the company for $26 a share. Much like Yahoo's drop after Microsoft took an offer off the table, Take-Two's shares are…
Click to viewAs part of Electronic Arts's efforts to promote Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, the video game publisher gave away $35,340 in free gas at a station in a north London neighborhood. The game, set in Venezuela, uses gasoline as a form of currency. However, the scene that developed looked more like Baghdad…
After Electronic Arts said it will not renew its takeover bid for videogame house Take-Two, Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick wrote EA CEO John Riccitiello a letter asking if his company could please present itself to EA management before it makes any final decisions. Riccitiello relented. Zelnick's goal: Convinve…
Napster founder Shawn Fanning never got a payday for his greatest creation. His latest, videogame social network Rupture, sold earlier this year — but for less than rumored. The actual price Electronic Arts paid, an SEC filing reveals, was $15 million, not $30 million. [Silicon Alley Insider]
Wordscraper is the latest Facebook game that looks remarkably like Scrabble from developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla. The new name and new look will hopefully be enough to keep the law dogs from Hasbro and Electronic Arts from running it out of town like they did to Scrabulous. Besides the new name and the new…
Electronic Arts once again extended its $2 billion offer to buy Take-Two, the makers of Grand Theft Auto. Once again, Take-Two said no. "Their proposal still significantly undervalues Take-Two," said chairman Strauss Zelnick in a statement. [Reuters]
Is San Francisco-based mobile videogames startup Hands-On Mobile in trouble? That was my first thought on reading that it had sold its Korean unit to Electronic Arts. EA moved to buy Hands-On's closest competitor, Jamdat, in 2005, and has been aggressively expanding in cell-phone games since. Hands-On, once rumored…
Electronic Arts' original bid to acquire videogame maker Take-Two expired on Friday, but was renewed this morning. Despite Wall Street predictions to the contrary and a $1 billion cash infusion, EA did not raise its $25.74 a share offer for the company behind the Grand Theft Auto series. Analysts predicted EA would…
In an attempt to rebrand The Sims Online, Electronic Arts renamed their massively multiplayer online doohickey EA Land. Now the site redirects to the project blog, which laments but does not explain the closure. [News.com]
Yahoo VP Elizabeth Harz has left the company to become SVP of global ad sales at videogame publisher Electronic Arts. At Yahoo, she was most recently in charge of poring over marketing data — the kind of background that will be invaluable to EA as the company develops advertising strategies for casual games on sites…
Electronic Arts has hired Eric Brown, an EA veteran, back from McAfee as CFO to replace the abruptly departing Warren Jenson. This comes as the company is trying to buy rival Take-Two Interactive. [WSJ]
