It's only Wednesday (at time of writing) and it has already been one wild week. On the same day that EA announces it will buy casual game maker Playfish for up to $400 million, they also announce another whopping layoff. This time 1500 more unlucky EA employees get whacked. What's next, a government bailout?!?

If the EA news isn't big enough, on the same day, Activision releases Modern Warfare 2 and day-one sales could top 7 milliion units. Seven million units in a single day!! Wow!!

I think EA's purchase of Playfish is a great strategic move. I think the Playfish guys are awesome. They are a great symbiosis of the worlds of Web 2.0 and more traditional gaming. All the Playfish guys I have ever met or heard speak are really cool, really smart, and really understanding of the games business. I like them a lot, and I wish them good luck in navigating the stormy sea that is EA right now. Because they are going to need it.

While EA's solid strategy validates the strength of the emerging social-gaming space and of independent digital distribution in general, it is also a move of some desperation after the company's failure to exploit these internally. If I were still an EA stockholder I'd be happy about the move but extremely skeptical of the management decisions that got them to this point and which have cost so many hardworking, longtime EA employees their jobs. I really feel for these people, especially in this economy.

I mean, while EA has been recklessly hiring boatloads of people and spending gazillions of development dollars on iffy games like the Godfather series, Mirror's Edge, G.I. Joe, or Mercenaries (to name just a few), and spending tons more on Pogo.com and supposedly gearing up for digital distribution in a big way... I've gotta ask: what in hell were they thinking?? How could they have been so blind to the emerging trends in social gaming the past couple years? At any time they could easily have put 10-15 employees onto a project like Playfish and built what Playfish has built for a mere fraction of the acquisition cost. It would have been so easy for them. Instead of laying off thousands of employees this year, they could have built this business and had a lot of these people happily working in the social-games division. So while it is a good strategic move and I'm happy for Playfish - the very fact EA had to do this while laying off thousands of employees is almost criminal.

And how does the success of Modern Warfare 2 mix into this? It demonstrates how rare it will be for a company to land a big success on the major consoles. It takes a huge budget to deliver despite which success remains difficult to find. For most titles, especially for new IP (intellectual property), it just won't be worth the enormous expense and risk. Most publishers won't be able to afford it. And even for those that can, they will produce a fraction of the titles they used to. Astutely, EA sees the writing on the wall and now joins the social media “race to zero” monetization battles. I just wish that they had seen it a few thousand laid-off employees ago. That would have been really smart.