EA responds to "soul-stealing" accusations

Awhile back, Activision claimed that EA had stolen the souls out of some developers that they acquired. What does EA have to say about this?

“The truth is, everyone laughed. In the past year EA has made radical changes to decentralize the company and put creative control back in the hands of development teams. It’s too early to declare victory but if you talk to people like Patrick Soderlund at dice in Stockholm, Mark Jacobs at Mythic in Virginia or Josh Resnick at Pandemic–they’ll probably tell you that it’s working. They get a lot of resources and creative freedom. That freedom has already contributed new start-ups like Dead Space, Mirror’s Edge and Boom Blox and there’s a lot of others to be announced soon. We’ve got a lot of work to do–internal and external–to let people know that EA has changed. Some of the complaints about EA employment practices had to do with us being the biggest and taking arrows for practices that were common throughout the industry. But there were things we absolutely had to change. We settled the class action lawsuits and changed how certain jobs were classified. More important, we changed the culture. I won’t speculate on the spiritual attributes of the city-states–but you should check in with friends at BioWare, Redwood Shores, the Sims, Criterion, Mythic and the Canadian studios. Most people think that big changes Riccitiello has made are very positive.” - EA vice president of corporate communications Jeff Brown

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