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Unless they settle beforehand, on June 10 a federal jury will hear some of the claims brought by one of the developers on the first John Madden Football, a lawsuit that alleges Electronic Arts owes him millions in unpaid royalties. On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that Robin Antonick's claim for unpaid royalties could go forward; he limited the scope of the claim, but allowed enough of it that a jury trial is in the future for Electronic Arts. Antonick filed his lawsuit in 2011, alleging that the game EA currently publishes still draws on work he performed and concepts he introduced in the first Madden (indeed, the box cover itself credits "John Madden and Robin Antonick.") Basically, he argues that when EA was building the first console versions of the game in the early 1990s, it simply copied over what he had written for the PC version. As that code or his concepts are still in use today, Antonick reasons he's entitled to royalties. Madden has sold somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 billion worth of product, so a lot is on the line here. Electronic Arts has, one would say, vigorously disputed Antonick's claim. In 2011 a spokeswoman said the case was "utterly without merit," and later, Trip Hawkins, the series' creator, said Antonick overrated his importance to the development of the series. It has repeatedly sought to have the case dismissed. The Hollywood Reporter has a lengthy description of the arguments in play, Antonick's claims, EA's counterclaims and the law involved. It is mind-numbing, but knock yourself out if you're that interested. Bottom line, Electronic Arts asked a judge to throw out Antonick's suit, and he didn't, and Madden, eight months after settling claims of price-fixing, is back in the courthouse again. Electronic Arts Faces Jury Trial Over Madden NFL [The Hollywood Reporter]

Too often, I wonder if the gaming industry shouldn’t just switch over to producing new versions of musical chairs and duck-duck-goose full-time. It does, after all, seem to be what we’re best at. Projects wrap, publishers “restructure,” and the unemployment line has to change the hinges on its revolving door. Again. This year, especially, has been viciously unkind on the layoff and closures front, and after a brief reprieve, it looks like the infernal old machine is whirring back to life. EA’s now confirmed a major round of layoffs of its own, though it won’t divulge exact numbers or details as to who’s been affected. Sources, however, are putting the grand total in the hundreds.

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EA Partners is to close down, it seems. Which seems fairly huge news if it proves to be accurate. The publisher, a portion of EA that was designed to publish games with a more hands-off approach than the mothercorp from developers not owned by themselves, is reported by some American magazine to be done.

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Game Informer is reporting that Electronic Arts will soon be closing down its "EA Partners" label, a program that saw the publishing giant release games from external studios like Valve and Crytek. It's also how two upcoming games - Insomnic's Fuse and the first game from Respawn, the studio set up by ex-Call of Duty developers - are due to be published, though the report says the label's closure has no effect on those games. Some of the biggest games to be released on the EA Partners label include Rock Band, Crysis and the retail release of Valve's Orange Box. Sources: EA Partners Facing Closure [Game Informer]

Why has the SimCity story gone away? It’s a good question. And the answer for it reveals much about how both the games industry, and the games journalism industry, work.

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The Electronic Arts layoff waves continue, with cuts reported at EA Hyderabad (India) and Playfish.

MCV India reports 50 employees were let go at the India mobile studio. As has been standard ops for EA during these layoff rounds, the company acknowledged there were cuts, but wouldn't discuss specifics.

Develop reports there have also been layoffs at social games developer Playfish, which isn't surprising since Playfish appears to have no games in production or to support following Monday's sunset announcements. EA bought Playfish for $300 million in 2009 (entering a "strategic" five year deal with Facebook in 2010). Again, there is no official count of how many employees have been let go.

Based on rough estimates following last week's layoffs, including the latest information and sources speaking under condition of anonymity, it appears EA has let go of over 300 employees (full-time and contract) this past week.

Before you skip everything in this video and run straight to the comments, understand the question: Many (not "most"; not "all") shooter video games feature licensed, real-world firearms. Gunmakers are compensated for the appearance of their brands as much as the NFL Players Association is paid for its members appearing in Madden. Does this present a moral choice to a video gamer? This is not equating video game violence to real-world violence. The narrator of this piece, Mike Rugnetta of PBS' Idea Channel, explicitly says so. But if you are disposed against the firearms industry and its chief lobbyist, the NRA, which uses video games as an intellectually dishonest diversion in its argument against any form of gun control, you should consider that which you buy. Yep, some games feature all the violence of Medal of Honor with none of the real world weapons. Think Halo. (Think even more over-the-top, like Bulletstorm. Does anyone make an exploding-charge flail gun?). Electronic Arts also has challenged the idea that some appearances of real-world military vehicles in video games requires the consent of their manufacturers, so who's to say this wouldn't extend, in some uses, to firearms. There are other edge cases, too; not every game featuring a gun is money paid to a gun maker. Still, for conscientious gamers, the most troublesome aspect of a realistic shooter may not be that it "trains" or desensitizes a civilian to the use of a real, military purpose assault weapon. It's that buying those games helps finance the lie that they do. YouTube Video Uploaded by PBS IdeaChannel

BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk is done with the gaming industry, at least from a development standpoint and at least for now, he told Games Industry after receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award with fellow doctor Ray Muzyka at GDC.

"I really don't see myself making a brand-new game developer," Zeschuk said. "I also don't really see myself working for anyone else, at least in the traditional sense. But I can imagine myself, for example, being on a board, consulting ... In building a business and making a game company, it is a kind of been there, done that feeling. When you've checked off all the boxes, why do it again? I don't really imagine a full-time gig in the business appealing to me - I just don't see it."

Zeschuk said he's proud of the creative legacy he cultivated at BioWare, and cites one specific regret of his time there: not making Jade Empire an Xbox 360 launch title. That "would have been massive," Zeschuk said.

EA acquired BioWare in 2007 prior to the launch of Mass Effect, and Zeschuk said he's still happy with that move. The BioWare team never had to conform to EA's standards of microtransactions or forced multiplayer, though it did have to keep the bottom line in mind, he said.

"The best analogy I use, in a positive way, is EA gives you enough rope to hang yourself. It was really interesting because we really made all the choices we wanted to make ourselves; these are all things we wanted to try ... That was the biggest revelation, that rope that EA gives you; they don't second-guess you, they don't say you shouldn't do that. We had complete creative control over a lot of it; some fans didn't like some of it and some of it was experimental, quite frankly."

What I mean is, the 2.0 update for Star Wars: The Old Republic is live (and trailered with a video entitled “Scum & Villainy”, in reference to something Spock once said in Star Trek). The update adds a hard mode to operations and flashpoints (weird dissonance there) which preps the ground for the Rise Of The Hutt Cartel expansion, which arrives in a couple of days (or right now if you pre-ordered). That’s an actual expansion that you will have to pay $20 for, just like they did when my pappy was a boy.

2.0, meanwhile, also overhauls PvP, changing the way that characters are “bolstered” when they enter a PvP area. Wow, that really does seem like a band-aid sort of mechanic, doesn’t it? Hmm. Anyone with extensive SWTOR PvP experience able to shine a light on that?(more…)

After several "non-critical" SimCity features were disabled over a month ago to improve server stability, one of the most significant is finally back online. SimCity players can now enable Cheetah Speed once again, invigorating their tiny Sims to work harder and faster than ever. Maxis is also working on "Update 2.0," though no date was offered regarding its expected release.

In other virtual city planning news, the Mac version of SimCity will be released on June 11. The Mac release will be available exclusively via Origin, with no plans for a retail version. As a nice bonus, those who own the PC version will automatically have access to the Mac version. Likewise, Mac players will be able to download the PC version at no extra cost. Cross-platform play between each version will be supported.

Good news! SimCity‘s gotten a potentially substantial piece of DLC, and it’s totally free. Bad news! It’s a gigantic ad for car company Nissan. Worse news! Its in-game functionality seems to make your city planning decisions even less consequential than before, which is quite a feat. Worst news! SimCity isn’t a very good game at all, even with its online issues mostly cleared up. Contrary opinion! This is one seemingly asinine move I think we should only partially leap down EA’s throat for. So maybe, like, just put in one leg. And do it kind of gently. Avoid the teeth, if you can.

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EA seized an entire movie theater in San Francisco in the midst of GDC 2013 to demonstrate nearly 20 minutes of Battlefield 4, which is also a video game. The venue was large and loud enough to encapsulate the shooter's cinematic aspirations, and flaunt every extravagant detail manifested in the weapons, soldiers, lighting and urban environments - right down to the cracking, withered paint on a door. Battlefield 4 belonged on every inch of that big screen.

And that's fine. I enjoy shooters, I adore movies, and I think there's a valid convergence to be found between the two. It's rarely a shortcut for superior storytelling, but the medium is malleable and fit for many authors. Some strive for realism, others seek expression in the abstract, and some guys prefer to make a crazy game about shipping soup to other planets.

None of those, however, have claimed responsibility for a "new era of interactive entertainment." That would be Battlefield 4, according to EA Games Vice President Patrick Söderlund. "Revealing the game to you all today is a big deal for us," he said in epilogue to the game's exquisitely rendered destruction. "It signals a new era of Battlefield and, frankly, a new era of interactive entertainment."

Happy face: PopCap’s Plants vs Zombies 2 will apparently arrive this Summer. Worried face: PopCap now belong to EA, who want to put microtransactions in everything they can. I’m crossing fingers, toes, unmentionables and internal organs that PvZ2 can somehow escape this disease and just be a lovely, complete little game of its own.(more…)

Battlefield 4 was officially announced this evening for PC, PS4 and "next-gen consoles," coming this fall. The game runs on Frostbite 3. It's been a weird road since Battlefield 4's unceremonious reveal in July 2012, where it was part of a pre-order bonus for Medal of Honor: Warfighter. Two EA military franchises enter, one survives a year later.

Note: This review concerns events that happen after the ending of Dead Space 3. As such, it discusses elements that may spoil the story for those who haven't finished it. You have been warned. Dead Space 3's "Awakened" DLC was pitched as a couple of different things. It was to serve as an epilogue to the game, presumably providing some clarity on the more nebulous plot points. It also promised to return players to the sort of horror that was more pronounced in the first two Dead Space games, a horror born of claustrophobia and psychosis.

Awakened delivers on these two points to a certain extent, but much more so on the former.

We’ve had quite a lot to say about SimCity but I haven’t told you wot I think yet. I posted my initial impressions two weeks ago, feeling like I’d only just scratched the surface. I’ve been scratching away since then, off and on, and now I’m ready to tell you what lies beneath.

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Well another person has learned: you don’t mess with Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It seems our coverage of the SimCity… no, not really. The rather more unfortunate reason for EA’s CEO, John Riccitiello’s stepping down is due to the publisher’s struggles to turn a profit, alongside warnings that the next quarter’s targets won’t be met.

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Well, it's been two weeks since the calamitous launch of the SimCity reboot and the game currently has a Metacritic score lower than the abysmal Resident Evil 6. A small blessing for developer Maxis? SimCity dodges being the highest profile stinker of this still burgeoning year thanks to the dishonor of the utterly broken Aliens: Colonial Marines.

• GameTrailers (80/100): "Aside from some issues with its online requirements, bugs, and restrictions on city size, it's still a satisfying and addicting simulator that will grant dozens of hours of entertainment with one well-designed city alone."
• GiantBomb (60/100): "And while I expect many will fall head-over-heels in love with this SimCity's cooperative design, at its best, the game feels more like a really thoughtfully designed multiplayer mode for a larger, single-player capable game that, sadly, doesn't exist."
• Gamespot (50/100): "The bugs will probably be fixed, the wrinkles smoothed, and the online problems sorted out. What hurts most, though, is that it didn't have to be this way. SimCity's makers looked to MMOGs for ideas on how to bring players together, but didn't absorb the lessons MMOG developers learned long ago on how to implement practical online play."
• Eurogamer (40/100): "There was a time, perhaps eight or nine hours in, when I wondered why SimCity was so easy. Nobody ever complained about the air pollution, while using my depot to sell my recycling netted me endless profits. I kept playing because, back then, I kept having fun, I kept trying new things and I kept convincing myself that I was a good Mayor. Now I know that it was never really down to me."
• Destructoid (40/100): "I wanted to like this game, I really did. At first I started to enjoy it, but soon all I found was frustration. I can't recommend this game to anyone, and I don't want to play it anymore myself because I am afraid of seeing all my efforts lost due to server issues."

As part of its efforts to re-endear customers to the new SimCity, EA is handing out one free Origin game to all players, from a choice of Battlefield 3, Bejeweled 3, Dead Space 3, Mass Effect 3, Medal of Honor Warfighter, Need for Speed Most Wanted, Plants vs. Zombies and SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition. To be eligible for a free game, players must register their copies of SimCity before March 25 at 11:59 p.m. PDT, and must claim a free game before March 30 at 11:59 PDT.

Underage players will automatically receive a copy of Bejeweled 3 and SimCity 4.

Many players worldwide were unable to connect to Maxis servers following SimCity's launch in early March, locking the game completely since it requires an always-on connection. In the weeks after its release, EA and Maxis dropped "non-critical" features from the game and added servers to allow players to connect, and are now in the process of re-adding these lost features. This fiasco frustrated many players, as did the game itself.

EA wants to say “sooorweeeee”. For pretending the game had to be online for server computations, and then ignoring us when we pointed out this wasn’t the case? No, not because of that! But for launching SimCity in the most extraordinarily inept fashion, with barely functioning servers, massive queues, frequent crashes, and the rest of the mess everyone in the whole world except EA and that one reviews editor predicted would happen. To make this up to everyone who’s activated a copy of the game, and rather madly to people who buy one any time up to the 25th March, there is a free game available. And they’re proper good ones, too. One of them is a rather fine city building game, called SimCity 4.

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#simcity Last week, two of our writers played SimCity and deliberately turned off their Internet connections, both finding their games continued normally and then abruptly ended after 20 minutes. Someone now has posted what appears to be code for the game that orders a shutdown after a disconnection exactly that long. That allegation further punctures the talking point that SimCity is necessarily an online game, or would take a great deal of work to make it so. More »

A key moment in the week’s SimCity shenanigans was unquestionably the appearance of a video from a modder, Azzer, announcing he’d found a way to remove the game’s offline timer. The final nail in the ridiculous-claims coffin, this mod demonstrated that everything but the asynchronous multiplayer was running on your home machine. We got in touch with the man behind the mod, one Azzer, and he had a lot more to say. In his opinion, the information coming from the servers is so rudimentary that despite Maxis’s claims, there shouldn’t be any problem at all in simulating the regional play offline.

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What Maxis are doing is frankly peculiar. Earlier this week we posted a story revealing that claims that SimCity required online servers to run non-regional computations were not the case. That night we were promised a statement from the studio, but heard nothing. Repeated emails to EA have resulted in no response since, and the whole situation has become more muddy with each day. It’s since been revealed that population numbers are nonsense, even down to leaked Javascript code (Javascript code? Was this meant to be a Facebook game at one point?) featuring “simcity.GetFudgedPopulation” as a function. We’ve learned that city size limits are arbitrary, pathfinding is rudimentary at best, and Eurogamer’s absolutely superb review lists many more bugs, broken features, disappearing pretend-money and never-arriving resources.

So it’s all the more odd to see Maxis head Lucy Bradshaw acting as if none of this is happening, and instead just carefully rewording her mantra of how SimCity is only supposed to be played online, but this time leaving out the bit about server-side computations for local play.

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Following claims yesterday that SimCity had been modified to run offline in a limited capacity, Maxis/EA general manager Lucy Bradshaw has since updated EA's official blog with a bulleted reiteration of Maxis' always-on design philosophy for the game.

In the missive, Bradshaw dismisses claims that SimCity's internet connectivity requirements are in reality "a clandestine strategy to control players" while listing a few of the ways in which server connectivity is essential to the design of the game, though she does not directly address whether the game can be played completely offline in its current form.

"So, could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes," Bradshaw added. "But we rejected that idea because it didn't fit with our vision. We did not focus on the 'single city in isolation' that we have delivered in past SimCities. We recognize that there are fans - people who love the original SimCity - who want that."

In this, our ELEVENTH DAY of the equivalent of PC gaming’s Leveson Inquiry, Senior Director of worldwide communications at EA Maxis Erik Reynolds has written a series of ‘transparent tweets’. These tweets indicate that a post on the Simcity forum about a hack for offline mode violated their Terms of Service, and the discussion would have to be moved elsewhere.(more…)

Reddit user AzzerUK claims to have enabled SimCity's debug mode and to have disabled its disconnection timer, both of which imply that there is more to the game's inner workings than EA and Maxis originally stated.

Currently, a user that loses their connection to the server during gameplay will be logged out of the game after 20 minutes. This is supposedly because the client must sync simulation data back to the server on a regular basis, in order to ease the computational load on the user's machine and to ensure the simulation as a whole runs smoothly.

Though not demonstrated in the video above, AzzerUK claims to have disabled that disconnection timer, and that playing an offline city for extended periods of time resulted in no issues with the simulation itself. Since SimCity does not support local saves in any way, it is not possible for AzzerUK to actually save anything that happens in his offline city, but the important thing is that the simulation reportedly did not come to a screeching halt after being unable to sync with the server.

The modder/hacker also claims to have enabled SimCity's debug mode, which allows for cities to be edited beyond their typically imposed borders. Though clipping and texture mapping issues are easily visible in the above clip, the traditionally impossible highways created at least appear to function properly. This supposes that, at least theoretically, the game is capable of supporting city sizes that are larger than what is currently available.

Two days ago, RPS published an article in which a Maxis insider revealed to us that SimCity does not, in fact, require the servers to run its non-regional game. Maxis reps had repeatedly insisted to the press that the game had to be online as it ran local computations on their own servers – a feature our source told us doesn’t exist at all. Extraordinarily, we’ve still yet to receive a statement from Maxis on the matter. Nor indeed have any of the rest of the games media who contacted EA for comments at the time of our story.

And now, if any further proof were needed, a modder has hacked the game to run entirely offline, and even play outside of the game’s ridiculously small borders.

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I've written five different openings to this SimCity review over three days. Some felt ignorant of the game's disastrous launch, an element I openly wrestled with before writing this review. Others were too aggressive and awkwardly angry. I fired blindly with some fluffy paragraph about the fun of building, but that seemed disingenuous. I'm unlikely to go back to SimCity for some time. The game simply isn't fun.

Like 2003's SimCity 4, this new SimCity uses a regional map divided into playable zones that interact with one another, transporting commuters and allowing for a level of specialization in particular zones. Unlike SimCity 4's sprawling megalopolis created from a massive grid of connected tiles, the new SimCity's region zones are separated by gaps (think of a subway map where you play the stations but not the lines between). The current region selection supports as little as two and up to 16 zones.

SimCity is very user friendly and a hallmark of modern interface design and simulation transparency. I must stress that I'm speaking specifically about when players are in their particular zone, not when they are trying to discern anything from a regional perspective. Pipes and electricity now run along roads, removing two dull mayoral duties seen in previous games. Crime, pollution, education, and just about every other chart is no longer presented in some tiny pop-up window, but is instead delivered in full graphical glory as an overlay on the main game screen. It's also great that players can now expand on buildings, like giving the police more cars or adding classrooms to schools, but this also begins to highlight the cramped size of the actual zones.

Alongside the peculiarities of the server matters with SimCity, many are reporting that the game itself doesn’t perform as had previously been claimed. This is especially the case when it comes to the AI and pathfinding.

SimCity’s Glassbox Engine had been purported to be of such complexity that every single Sim in your city was a unique “agent” AI, such that you could follow a Sim about their daily life. However, players are finding that this doesn’t appear to be the case at all.

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In all the fuss and mess of the disastrous SimCity launch, one refrain has been repeated again and again. While legions may be begging for an offline mode, EA representatives have been abundantly clear that this simply isn’t possible. Maxis’ studio head, Lucy Bradshaw, has told both Polygon and Kotaku that they “offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers”, and that it would take “a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game” for single player.

A SimCity developer has got in touch with RPS to tell us that at least the first of these statements is not true. He claimed that the server is not handling calculations for non-social aspects of running the game, and that engineering a single-player mode would require minimal effort.

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