The Game Planet

Nov02

World of Warcraft hits 11 million

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Blizzard's monstrously popular MMOG reaches new subscriber milestone two weeks before launch of second expansion.

Blizzard Entertainment is just over two weeks away from releasing the second expansion pack to its genre-dominating massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King. And despite increased competition this year from the likes of Funcom's Age of Conan and EA Mythic's Warhammer Online, Blizzard has managed to continue to stave off WOW fatigue to usher in that expansion's arrival.

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EA laying off 6% of workforce

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Despite 40% jump in quarterly revenue, losses lead megapublisher to pink-slip more than 500 employees; Madden sells 4.5 million, Spore 2 million; Warhammer subscribers hit 800,000.

It's been a rough year for Electronic Arts. Last Halloween, the Redwood City, California-based publisher had a share price of $61.12 and was riding high on the acquisition of superdeveloper BioWare/Pandemic. Today, the company's stock ended at $27.73, after a steady decline accelerated by the past month's economic bloodbath on Wall Street.

Unfortunately for many EA employees, 2008 is about to get a whole lot rougher. Today, Electronic Arts announced that it is laying off six percent of its global workforce as part of a company-wide cost-reduction plan. With a payroll of about 9,000 worldwide, the layoffs will affect approximately 540 people. In a conference call this afternoon, executives said the layoffs will come from EA's publishing and corporate divisions, as well as from its various studios and labels.

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IGN: PC Game of the Month: October 2008

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It's been a big month, but one game stood out amongst the high profile and high quality competition.

Beating out games like Ubisoft Montreal's Far Cry 2 and Electronic Arts LA's Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 is Bethesda's role-playing epic Fallout 3.

It's a game many in the PC community were skeptical of when it was announced, since Bethesda was clearly taking the franchise in a new direction.

No longer was the action turn-based or the perspective isometric.

Instead, things were switched to first-person and the action points system was given new life as a hybrid real-time and turn based mechanic. And man, did it ever turn out great.

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