March Patch Speculation 2020

"darrenfroggy;c-17427986" wrote:

"catloverplayer;c-17427906" wrote:

"darrenfroggy;c-17427760" wrote:
A statement from EA:
https://www.ea.com/news/an-ea-update-on-the-coronavirus-situation?isLocalized=true

It's not as simple as "they can work from home". They had entire studios around the world completely shut, which I would guess has heavily affected even those working from home. And some of those closures would've been with short notice (if any) so they might not have been ready to move staff to working from home - they need to bring their work equipment etc, set up for communication. Every step that's normally done on site takes longer, especially anything that's outsourced to other companies. QA might be the most hit of them all because bug fixing needs multiple devices for tracking and reproducing bugs.

I think it's going to take a lot of luck to get even an April patch since most quarantines/lockdowns in Europe are only just starting.

Yes but what about the US? As far as I know they haven't closed any US offices so that shouldn't effect new patches,packs and content. I do wonder however how this will effect EA's Fiscal in April.

The announcement says that all offices (including the US ones) are now work from home. And again, it's not as simple as "well, this office is closed", their offices are linked and if, for example, their localization ones (in Spain) are closed or on lower ourput, it affects ALL produced content. It's not like TS4 is only done in Redwood.

I believe TS4 is mostly done in Redwood and Austin though. The only other locations of TheSimsStudio (former Maxis before the reorganization) are Helsinki and Melbourne but they work on the mobile games.
Not saying they don't interact at all with other studios or locations or outsource at all (for translation purposes for instance) but I think they are pretty independent.
This statement from EA is a global one, as it includes all their game franchises and international subdivisions.