So, EA announced a big quarterly loss. That’s not big news by itself since the nature of the game industry means investments in big multi-year projects that don’t always pay out steadily. The big news is that they decided to lay off 600 people, or 6% of their workforce.

That’s important because the video game industry is frequently thought of as, if not immune to recessions, at least highly resistant to them.

EA, of course, is one of the biggest publishers out there. Their holiday lineup looks solid, including Dead Space, Spore, Left 4 Dead and Mirror’s Edge. That’s to say nothing of their money-printing Madden and The Sims properties. Where’s the trouble?

“We experienced a few slips and kills,” Riccitiello noted during the call, referring to publicly disclosed cancellations like EA LA’s Tiberium and the delays of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Pandemic’s Saboteur and Lord of the Rings: Conquest as having an impact on revenue. A drop in back catalog titles was also blamed for weaker performance.

Heh. Oh yeah, the Harry Potter game. I guess having the movie pushed back kind of screws with EA’s expectations if they need to release the game to capitalize on the film hype.

So, things don’t look bad over the long term for EA, but it seems like they’re expecting a slower Christmas than usual. It’s too bad about the layoffs. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area where EA is headquartered, and I have enough friends getting laid off already without more people getting dumped onto the job market.

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