When I was in grad school, I took this class called “Digital and Physical Light,” which was a grad seminar class between the lighting designers in the School of Theatre and the grads in the ACCAD (the Advanced Center for Computing and Design). The ACCAD kids were the future of animation and digital lighting – Maya people, animators, etc – and it was interesting to see light from an animation side. I gained a lot of respect for those digital lighters that semester.
The above rambling is relevant to the article because a bunch of animators and digital lighting designers are rumored to lose their jobs today – EA Games’ developer Pandemic Studios in LA is possibly laying off 200 people today. This is in part to some cutbacks EA is having. Isn’t it weird to read about light in video game news?!
EA just ponied up $300 million bucks to buy “social game developer” Playfish, a company that develops games for the iPhone, Android, and Facebook platforms. Why they would do that seems fairly obvious, being that it’s a huge market and all. James Riccitiello, EA’s CEO, said that “EA is performing well, with quality, sales and segment share up so far this year. We are making tough calls to cut cost in targeted areas and investing more in our biggest games and digital businesses.”
It sucks that the holidays show up, and people lose their jobs. It sucks any time of year that people lose their jobs – it just sucks even more for me when it’s cold out. Thanksgiving and Christmas are around the corner.
You gotta love the economy. I wonder how those Goldman Sachs bonuses are going to be this Christmas.
Thanks, Gamasutra.
