Game Sales Down, Layoff Ax Begins Swinging

It started with the announcement that Electronic Arts was laying off 1,500 jobs, but weak November sales have more companies looking at cutting its workforce, according to an interesting article in VentureBeat.

Among the companies swinging the ax:

• Atari sacked CEO David Gardner and replaced him with Jeff Lapin, the company's #2 man.
• Harmonix, the division of MTV that made The Beatles Rock Band, is laying off 39 people.
• EA Redwood Shores, Maxis, Pandemic and Tiburon development studios all took hits as part of the previously announced EA layoffs.

But, according to the article, social gaming companies are hiring:

Venture capitalist Tim Chang said at the party that social game companies are the hot ticket now and his inbox is full of resumes from people who work in the traditional console game industry. Meanwhile, lots of developers who have lost jobs are trying their hand at creating iPhone games, which can be done by small teams on shoestring budgets.

And while some companies have been laying off, others have been hiring:

As an example of layoffs leading to job creation, Activision Blizzard has started a new studio in Foster City, Calif., not far from where EA has its headquarters, and has hired former EA executives Glen Schofield and Micheal Condrey to run the group, dubbed Sledgehammer Games. And THQ, which laid off hundreds of developers this spring and last fall, announced it would build a game studio in Montreal, thanks to Quebec government subsidies.

Game sales in December are expected to be good, but it is no guarantee as the economy slowly starts to recover.