EA Consolidates Studios: Westwood Closed

After reporting that third-quarter profits were up 48% over the previous year's, Electronic Arts announced that it was consolidating its Los Angeles, Irvine, and Las Vegas developers into a single development studio, to be located in new offices in LA. Since the Las Vegas unit was, for all intents and purposes, Westwood Studios, this means Westwood will be closing its doors.

The main reason cited was that, with the release of the massively multiplayer space game Earth and Beyond this past October, Westwood had no new projects in the works. Westwood founder Louis Castle will most definitely be making the transition to the new LA studio, as will an undisclosed number of others working on the Command & Conquer franchise. The fate the rest of Westwood's roughly 100 employees is not known at this time.

EA Pacific in Irvine, which has been handling the C&C franchise for the last year, including the soon to be released Command & Conquer: Generals, will be left mostly intact after the move. Currently the group is beginning work on an expansion pak to Generals.

The current EA Los Angeles is the developer of the Medal of Honor franchise, and has remained housed in the Dreamworks Interactive offices since EA bought MOH from Dreamworks some years back. The consolidation will enable the MOH team to move into the new offices with the other EA developers.

In fact, EA is pushing its new LA studios as huge, uber-studio. Although a specific location has not yet been decided on, it will apparently be located not far from several major film studios, and eventually employ more people than any EA studio besides the company's main headquarters in Redwood, CA.

In any case, Westwood Studios, creators of the classic PC RPG series Legends of Kyrandia and Land of Lore, all but invented real-time strategy games with Dune: Battle for Arrakis, and, of course, gave us Command & Conquer, will no longer exist as of March 31.

Information from: Gamers.com