A College Guide to EA

DesiVideoGamer writes "With all the recent news about EA, one of the professors at Carnegie Mellon University is giving a talk about EA after he visited the company for a semester. He also published a white paper about EA and what college grads should know about it. (pdf format) The paper talks a lot about the culture at EA and could indirectly explain the previous stories covered by Slashdot."

Factually False...

[myrdred]

The article states, on the first page, that EA is a huge company, bigger than Apple and Pixar combined. Then procceeds to give numbers, anual revenues of $3 Billion and Market Cap of 15 Billion. Uh-uh. Apple has an annual revenue of over 10 Billion, and market cap of 21 Billion.

See: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AAPL

Considering the blatant lack of facts in such easy to check information, I'd take what the rest of the article says with a big grain of salt.

BitTorrent, just in case:

[Lowca]

http://chris-low.dyndns.org:6969/torrents/PauschAc ademicsFieldGuideToEA.pdf.torrent?ADAA8F351E795039 6A6FC2B3D7AF1C785533D3BF [dyndns.org]

Re:75% fresh meat?

[Anonymous Coward]

no, the paper said that 75% of the new hire would eb college grads, which doesn't mean new grads, jsut people with degrees. and elsewhere is says that they prefer not to hire those with no experience

How to turn off the intro video

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure if this works for Burnout 3, but for Battlefield 1942 I got rid of the intro video by rnaming its .bik file in the Movies directory. It's pretty annoying that they don't provide any hotkey or setting to get rid of it.

I agree that most of EA's games are just clones of previous titles. What I don't understand is, why do they have such serious cruncing among programmers if they are essentially creating a new copy of something they had before? The whole point of software development is that once you create something, you never have to create it again. I could understand burnout among artists, testers or game designers, but the developers are just rehashing the same old code, and have the experience from hundreds of big titles in similar genres at their disposal; they should have the easiest job.

Re:Factually False...

[elysian1]

Not exactly. Apple's stock price has gone up considerably over the past six months. It's stock price closed at $55.50 on Friday but six onths ago, it was $27-28. If we consider that the article was written during spring semester of 2004, the lastest that would be would be late May to early June, 2004 which is about 6 months ago. At that time, Apple was probably worth $11-12 billion. Another intersting note, EA's stock has gone down a bit since six months ago. It's worth around $14.5 billion now.

Re:You don't get the hostility?

[bob beta]

How about the fact that they are breaking the law by improperly classifying employees as exempt and therefore not paying them their due overtime?

. . .

but we are talking about taking action. Boycotts, Letters to editors, Letters to company chiefs.

If they are breaking the law, why are you advocating 'underground' fighting methods. Get them prosecuted.

Then the issue can be resolved, i.e. the laws can be repealed, or enforced. Why go to mob-rule tactics immediately?

Or are they not breaking the law, and that was just an excercise in rhetoric?

Re:I feel that the professor let his students down

[paranoidia]

I just wanted to let you in on a little insight about the professor who wrote this article, since I know him personally.

He teaches a class at CMU called Building Virtual Worlds, which I'm in. The class is a boot camp for the ETC (Entertainment Technology Center) majors to get them to learn how to work in groups under extreme time requirements. Students put easily 40-60, and usually up to 80 hours into this single class. When EA came, many of the students were talking about the crazy time requirements for there and how it was just like the BVW class.

But the Prof never really talks about EA in class or during discussions and doesn't try to influence anyone at all. It's more of a real world experience thing for him than a 'this is how it should be'. Even though the class is also really time intensive.

But this prof is also a brilliant guy for his ability to get people to really want to work really hard to create something. Grades don't really matter to him, just creating something new, different, and that pushes the limits of what's has never been done before.

Re:The way to hurt EA?

[c0dedude]

They use damn child labor and sweatshops for their garments, you think this'll bug them?