"cactusjuice;c-16442429" wrote:
I never said Redwood you did. I doubt the Melbourne arm of EA/Maxis is made up solely of Australians, nor the Finland arm of Finns, or that every aspect of those mobile games is made autonomously within those companies
The Melbourne arm of EA was founded in 1999 by Robert Murray as Firemint Studios. Firemint bought another Australian developer Infinite Interactive in January 2011. But in May 2011 Firemint was bought by EA who already in 2010 had bought the Australian developer Ironmonkey Studios. EA then merged Firemint with Ironmonkeys to become Firemonkey Studios. But those studios already had enough Australian developers and therefore didn’t need EA to find US devs who were ready to be transferred to the other side of the earth.
EA also didn’t make EA Finland with US devs. The reason why this studio was placed in Finland was also that it already had skilled developers. To tell your local devs to sell their houses and move their families thousands of miles away to a new job only for either the husband or the wife will usually mean that more than 95% of them will prefer to just leave and work for another local company instead. So it isn’t something that EA can usually do unless EA only want to transfer one or two devs temporarily to help a new team with a game.
