EA Louse Dishes Dirt On Warhammer

It's quickly making the rounds online, but it seems that a blogger styling him(or her)self as "EA Louse" (in a wordplay on "EA Spouse" made a rather condemning post towards EA and, particularly, BioWare Mythic.

The truthfulness can, of course, be very much put into question. There is absolutely zero evidence that this isn't all just some made-up hoax. Though similarly there's little evidence to say that it's all false.

Either way the poster seems to have made the post in a rather disgruntled state, claiming to have found out that he (or she) will soon be fired in another round of layoffs come this November apparently. The poster comes across as an artist (possibly an animator) who worked on Warhammer Online and is now airing a whole list of grievances towards how the development of that project went.

You can read it all at the blog (as well as several posts made in the comments by the blogger). But for us the most relevant bits are where the poster talks about Star Wars: The Old Republic. And, according to the poster, it isn't pretty:

And Bioware? Don’t make me laugh. They’ve spent more money making the Old Republic than James Cameron spent on Avatar. Shit you not. More than $ 300 million! Can you believe that?

And you know what they’re most proud of? This is the kicker. They are most proud of the sound. No seriously. Something like a 20Gig installation, and most of it is voiceover work. That’s the best they have. The rest of the game is a joke. EA knows it and so does George Lucas,they’re panicking , and so most of Mythic has already been cannibalized to work in Austin on it because they can’t keep pushing back launch.

Old Republic will be one of the greatest failures in the history of MMOs from EA. Probably at the level of the Sims Online. We all know it too ……

Again, how much of it is true is anyone's guess at the moment. The poster could be telling the truth, the poster could be understating the truth, the poster could be making the whole thing up, heck the poster could quite possibly not work for EA at all and be some disturbed kid in a bid for fame.

If there is truth to it then there's a few things to remember. One, when people lose their job or are otherwise upset then things tend to look very grim and everything tends to look amplified in the negative direction. Secondly it's all a matter of perspective and the poster might be judging the thing completely wrong or completely misunderstanding the situation; the poster doesn't sound like someone very high up so can only guess at a lot of the motivations. And third, regarding SWTOR the poster probably doesn't have that much more inside knowledge than the rest of us (the poster isn't working on SWTOR directly and only gets things from hearsay and speculation within the company). It's certainly not unusual for game developers to move members from one team to another, particularly one that it very, very big and is very, very much in the spotlight. That doesn't mean that the project is in trouble. It's also quite possible that the poster is somewhat disgruntled over the MMO (s)he worked on not doing very well in the end and all attention now seeming to go to SWTOR; it might be some kind of vindication if SWTOR fails too ("see, it wasn't our fault but it was EA's fault").

Of coruse, all of that is speculation on my part. it's also possible that it's all true.

Well, at least apart from the part where he talks about how Sanya lost her job as she, in turn on her blog, points out that that wasn't quite how things went. Again, that could just be the difference of perception and speculation.

Either way, whether it is true or not, I am sure that this isn't the right way to air one's grievances however much people might be applauding the daring of making such a post now. I've got a feeling that EA's legal team isn't going to be happy regardless of whether it's true or not.

And regarding SWTOR nothing has really changed. The game could still be great, the game could still be terrible; we still won't know until the game is released and we're all playing it by the (potentially) millions. The only thing that has changed perhaps is that a few more people might be aware of the possibility that, despite all the marketing and hype around SWTOR, this game could actually be bad. But I could've told you that without such a blog post.

Take it how you wish. I'm labeling it as "rumor".


[link] to EA Louse's blog post.
[link] to Sanya's response to the blog post.