Confirmed: EA guts Pandemic

 Update: A Shacknews report confirms that EA has cut a large potion of the workforce at Pandemic, but says that it  is not getting rid of the studio, - it is  consolidating it into a “core team” and moving it to EALA. Here’s what EA said officially:

“Pandemic Studios and its franchises will be relocated to the EALA facility in nearby Playa Vista,” a rep for the company told Shacknews. “This move has resulted in a reduction in the work force at Pandemic…That said, the Pandemic brand and franchises will continue to live on. A core team of Pandemic developers will move to EALA and continue development on Pandemic games with a focus on quality, cost management and schedule integrity.”

Original Story: Is the other shoe about to drop for Panedemic’s L.A. studio? According to this Kotaku report, citing reliable sources close to the situation, EA will lay off most of Pandemic’s Los Angeles studio at 11 AM PST. The Saboteur, the current project being developed by Pandemic will  be shifted to Army of Two developer EA Montreal - also according to the Kotaku report.

Pandemic’s Brisbane studio, which was developing a game adaption of the latest Batman film, The Dark Knight, was cut loose from the EA family in January of this year. Pandemic is best known for developing such franchises as Full Spectrum Warrior, Mercenaries, Star Wars: Battlefront and Destroy All Humans.

If this rumor is true it means that most of the 200 people that work at Pandemic L.A. will be out of work right before the holidays, which is absolutly horrible, but a typical move by corporations in the fourth quarter. Earlier in the month EA laid off a large number of employees from its Maxis studio. No doubt EA will be making cuts across the board as it tries to hit the restructuring number of 1500 before the next fiscal quarter in March 2010.

We’ll have more on this story as it develops and hopefully an official confirmation or denial from EA soon.

EEDAR analyst predicts Xbox 360 Elite price cut very soon

According to EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich Microsoft may be cutting the price of the Xbox 360 Elite very soon - within a week in fact.

“We expect Microsoft to make an official announcement, in the next week, regarding the elimination of the Xbox 360 Pro SKU and the reduction in the Elite SKU pricing to $299,” Divnich said in a recent investor alert. “We do not know the full extent of the upcoming Xbox 360 promotion. There is a possibility that one of the systems could have a larger hard-drive at the $299 price. EEDAR, however, does not believe any disparity in hard-drive size will make a noticeable difference in how consumers value each product.”

Further details on this are not available, but there have been several unconfirmed reports that Microsoft was preparing to do this. We’ll let you know more about this as it develops. The $299 price-point puts the fancy Elite unit right in the price range of the freshly announced PS3 Slim and the older fatter models.

Green Lantern game rumored

According to a report on VentureBeat, citing several undisclosed sources, a Green Lantern video game is in the works and is believed to be linked to the Green Lantern film from Casino Royale and Goldeneye director Martin Campbell. According to this report, the game will be developed by Double Helix, who most recently worked on the G.I. Joe movie tie-in games and Silent Hill Homecoming.

Of course, it doesn’t make a lot of sense if it is true, considering that Warner Bros. owns Snowblind Studios, who made the wonderful Justice League Heroes games for PS2, PSP and Xbox. Both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game are in the works, says VentureBeat.

Meanwhile, Warner Bros is not talking about this story, saying only that it does not comment on rumor and speculation.

Forza Motorsport 3 in 2009 Likely

A video presentation showing off a logo (see it?) for the game as part of a 2009 line-up listing was spotted by CVG today. The video featuring that brief seen has since been pulled from YouTube, but not before every Tom, Dick and Jerry decided to write a story about it. Not exactly a concrete confirmation that Microsoft is planning the third title in the popular Xbox 360-only racing series, but it’s better than getting kicked in the face with steel toed boots.

One would expect that if Microsoft is going to officially announce the game it will happen sometime during the week of June 1st at its E3 press conference. If that happens, we’ll let you know so you can obsess about some other unannounced game.

Maybe it’s time to start clamoring about a new Zelda game?

Thanks, G4TV.com

More Syndicate Rumor Mongering

I love a good rumor as much as the next guy, so this juicy rumor about Starbreeze developing a new Syndicate game is certainly super delicious. According to a source close to the company, confiding in GameIndustry.biz - who is apparently great at keeping secrets (remind me not to tell them about that drunken bender I had in Tijuana in ‘89) - says that the rumor is true. The project which Starbreeze has called “Project Redlime” is apparently a new Syndicate game being developed for the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. The original Syndicate series was created by Peter Molyneux’s Bullfrog Studios, which was eventually acquired by EA.

GameIndustry.biz surmises that work on this game will have to wait until after Starbreeze finishes the work it is doing for EA on the next Robert Ludlum Bourne game, which EA acquired the rights to when Activision dumped the rights earlier this year. Naturally all of this is supposition and rumor, and EA is not commenting on any of it. If it is true, EA could do worse: Starbreeze is responsible for such hits as The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and The Darkness..

we’ve put a request out to EA for comment in the meantime.

Sony’s ‘BIG’ Announcement: PS2 Price Cut

While everyone was fantasizing about what Sony’s big announcement was today, it turned out that the most obvious answer was the right one - a PS2 price cut. Earlier this week pundits, journalists, financial analysts and every Tom, Dick and Mary were trying to guess just what wondrous announcement Sony would make today. Would it be a PS3 price cut? Perhaps they’d announce officially details on the next iteration of the PSP? Or maybe they would announce a deal with Netflix for streaming high-definition movie content to PS3 users? FAIL.

Sony announced this morning via the PlayStation Blog that it would be cutting the price of the PlayStation 2 to just under a $100 ( $99.99 MSRP). It’s not romantic, but it’s still good news for those folks that A) don’t own one B)still want one.. though I don’t know who the hell you people are!?! Oh, here’s some other news for you people that are slow on the uptake: Barack Obama won the election.

Rumor: Fable III at GDC

Will Peter Molyneux be revealing Fable III or some other secret game project at the Game Developers Conference later this month? Perhaps he’s being cheeky, but Molyneux said at the BAFTA awards ceremony that those curious about what Lionhead is currently working on will want to pay close attention to what he does or says at GDC.

“Naming a particular game before it’s out is a difficult thing. And I’ll tell you why, because in two weeks I’m about to fly out to America for the Gamers’ Development Conference and that’s the time when you start to see what’s really coming up,” said Molyneux to the BBC.

British radio and television personality Jonathan Ross also threw some gasoline on the fire by saying that he was doing some voice work for Fable III via twitter.

Maybe this will be like a fake out make out where Molyneux tells us about the ship in a bottle he’s been working on for the last three months. Stay tuned. Check out our Fable II games page to see just how good the last game in the popular RPG series rated.

thanks, www.vg247.com.