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They’ve brought us games like Destroy All Humans, Star Wars Battlefront and Mercenaries, and this week they were taken away from us. There is no denying that Pandemic Studios brought us some intriguing and entertaining titles over the past decade but how should we reflect upon what was essentially a closure by EA, a little under two years after they took over.

Only thirty five of the two hundred and sixty-three staff members at Pandemic are still employed by EA and arguably that’s only to support the up and coming Pandemic title, The Saboteur. Putting The Saboteur aside, in the brief two years that Electronic Arts owned Pandemic Studios they’ve managed a handful of averagely received releases.

One of them was the highly anticipated Mercenaries 2, which unfortunately was dismissed for seemingly coming two years too late. Meanwhile, the other was Lord of the Rings: Conquest, which although personally I haven’t played, the 55% Metacritic rating probably says that not all was well.

How should we reflect upon Pandemic’s closure, under two years after EA’s acquisition

They have brought us two averagely run-of-the-mill titles and the fact that these lay-offs happened two weeks before the launch of The Saboteur, doesn’t suggest EA has faith in that title either, however, we’ll get back to that later. Should we mourn the loss of a budding developer or is this just the result of bad performance mixed with the recession.

Let’s make a few things clear. Obviously for EA, this is all just business, so let’s not demonise them. Pandemic clearly had a hard time trying to grasp the new generation of hardware because Battlefront and the original Mercenaries were both great titles, while any next-generation content they produced was arguably second rate, the critical response backs this up. So with this in mind, EA culling a few of the staff is just another business decision, if albeit a difficult one to make.

This doesn’t mean we should fully support EA’s decision. We know should know that EA is a business but a industry built upon consistent performance won’t lead to artistic freedom. If anything firing a developer simply because of a few bad games will only result in other developers playing it safe.

Pandemic did bring us some pretty enjoyable titles and should be applauded for past work, but that brings me on to their future work. Let’s forget that the remaining guys will be working on a 3rd Mercenaries game because judging the fate of that game isn’t fair considering all we have seen is a title card.

Performance based firings will only result in more ’safe’ games and a lack of artistic freedom

In actuality, their last game will be The Saboteur and as press and fans we have to decide how to see the recent layoffs. If we just dismiss it as another developer gone for bad performance, this will affect and possibly intensify any critical comment on the final release. Expect the odd cries of ‘this is why they were let go’ from message boards in a few weeks. However, the reverse could favourably affect the reception; these guys lost their jobs so let’s go easy on them.

The Saboteur will actually, be it good or not, throw gaming journalism into an interesting experiment. How bias, sub-consciously or consciously, is our industry? Whatever the result we need try and avoid hyperbole and belittlement, in light of recent events.