lbalbalba writes "Electronic Arts is shutting down its Westwood-based game developer Pandemic Studios just two years after acquiring it, putting nearly 200 people out of work. 'The struggling video game publisher informed employees Tuesday morning that it was closing the studio as part of a recently announced plan to eliminate 1,500 jobs, or 16% of its global workforce. Pandemic has about 220 employees, but an EA spokesman said that a core team, estimated by two people close to the studio to be about 25, will be integrated into the publisher's other Los Angeles studio, in Playa Vista.' An ex-developer for Pandemic attributed the studio's struggles to poor decisions from the management."

EA Digital Illusions CE has quietly opened up the beta of Battlefield Heroes, their long-delayed, free-to-play shooter. After gradually scaling up the number of players in the closed beta, they've now made the game available to everyone and lifted the NDA. EA has not yet mentioned this in an official announcement, probably hoping to keep their servers from being overwhelmed. The game's website is now accepting signups. IGN ran a hands-on preview of Battlefield Heroes back in April.

An anonymous reader writes "We've all heard about user-generated content for games that have fixed toolsets — but this interesting piece on Develop has got me thinking about the idea of games production being opened to a community before development finishes. A new iPhone game (Aztec Odyssey) did that with its soundtrack; could someone do it with the game's art assets? Or level design? A great comment under the story says that LittleBigPlanet would have been more interesting if it was just shipped as a toolset with no pre-built levels. I'm inclined to agree!"

CarnegieScience writes "Scientist calculate that, compared to ethanol used for internal combustion engines, bioelectricity used for battery-powered vehicles would deliver an average of 80% more miles of transportation per acre of crops, while also providing double the greenhouse gas offsets to mitigate climate change."