Not a boom year for non adult...

[softball]

This sounds awfully like what is happening in porn. As you can imagine, it is big local news around here (their "campus" is by my old jr. high), but it is going to put a whole lot of high end, highly skilled designers and programmers into the market real soon.
There is a lot of correlation between their tribulations and the porn market.

Video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. is cutting 1,500 jobs across its operations, including a “significant” number of positions at its Burnaby campus.
The cuts announced Monday amount to 16 per cent of the company’s global workforce, EA communications director Colin Macrae said.
The job losses stem from an industry-wide decline in packaged-goods sales because of the economic slump and a shift by consumers to digital gaming content, Macrae said.
EA provided company-wide layoff numbers but declined to detail the number of layoffs at its various studios and publishing locations.
EA employed 1,500 people at its Burnaby campus and 1,200 in Montreal and Edmonton.
The maker of video games Skate 2, Madden NFL 10 and The Beatles: Rock Band reported a fiscal second-quarter loss of $391 million, or $1.21 a share, compared to a loss of $310 million, or 97 cents, a year earlier, according to a media statement.
EA said the job reductions will result in annual costs savings of at least $100 million.
The layoffs came on the same day that EA announced it has acquired Playfish Ltd., a maker of games for the social-networking site Facebook Inc., MySpace and the iPhone, for at least $275 million.
“We are making tough calls to cut cost in targeted areas and investing more in our biggest games and digital businesses,” said EA chief executive officer John Riccitiello.
The layoffs are further proof that EA hasn’t been recession-proof. The video-game giant cut 11 per cent of its workforce (1,100 people) in January of this year, citing poor Christmas holiday sales, and reduced the number of projects in development.
Riccitiello has pushed to restore profitability by cutting jobs, closing development studios and focusing on fewer titles with greater revenue potential. Industry sales are down 13 per cent this year, according to researcher NPD Group Inc.
“EA is still a company in transition,” said Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Lazard Capital Markets LLC in San Francisco. “They’re going through a fairly large restructuring in a tough industry right now

http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Ele...620/story.html