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Hot on the heels of Atari announcing the closing of its Santa Monica, CA, and Beverly, MA, offices, Eidos quietly announced yesterday that it has closed its Ion Storm Austin office and will ramp up its Crystal Dynamics studio in San Francisco.

Ion Storm Austin, known for the Deus Ex franchise and the recent Thief: Deadly Shadows, had been hit by numerous staff departures in the past year, starting with Harvey Smith in February 2004, and Warren Spector later in 2004. According to several sources, numerous other employees have left and joined Midway's office in Austin. The latest news means the loss of 35 jobs at the Austin office. A source inside Eidos said that some of these people may get offers to work elsewhere in Eidos or at Crystal Dynamics, but nothing has been officially released.

In a prepared statement, Eidos said "This is part of the company's move to consolidate and strengthen its technical and management capabilities into a smaller number of studios which are capable of scaling up in order to meet the competitive challenges that lie ahead, particularly in anticipation of next generation technologies and platforms."

In a related move, Eidos said it will be increasing the development capabilities at its Crystal Dynamics studio in San Francisco. More than 50 people are expected to be hired as it move from a two to a three-team studio. Once all positions are hired, Crystal Dynamics would employ more than 180 people.

News source: GameSpy

Neowin spoke to LokiTorrent's owner, Lowkee, a few weeks ago, as the legal battle was just getting underway. "I run a completely legal website that the MPAA or anyone else has no right to force me to close," he said. "In just the past few weeks, the MPAA has forced the shutdown of many other BitTorrent sites which were set up to do nothing more than allow people to share what they wished. It will be a dark day when we roll over to let organizations such as the RIAA and MPAA make our freedom of speech laws for us.

"Piracy is a byproduct of peer sharing," he added. When peer-to-peer software is being written, there aren't 10 developers wringing their hands together over how much software and music people can steal from those who make a living selling it. Peer sharing is used to allow people who don't have the financial funding of the MPAA and RIAA to share their works, for free, to a worldwide audience without the massive costs of bandwidth punishing them for being popular."

Remember, for all its faults (including the odd lawsuit against 12-year-olds, or dead people), the Recording Industry Association of America did do one thing differently. It waited until there was a mainstream, easily-available and legal alternative to the P2P networks before it launched its legal actions. Napster, iTunes and all have taken off - they may not yet have the same volume of downloads as services like Kazaa did in their hey-day, but it's growing all the time, and surely it won't be that much longer until legal music downloads actually do take over.

The movie business, however, is nowhere near this level. Napster has mentioned it plans to get into it at some point in the future, but no dates have been mentioned yet. There are a few services up and running now, but many of them are (once again) American-only - and others have a small selection of films that most of us have never heard of. Hardly that great of an incentive when a quick search will yield the latest blockbuster, watchable within just a few hours. Link up your computer to your TV and a decent surround sound system, and it's pretty much impossible to tell it apart from the real thing.

I have no doubt legal movie downloads - whether they're pay-per-view, download and keep, or a 24-hour "licence" to watch (pretty much like getting a movie out of Blockbuster or somewhere else at the moment) will come. However, it seems that it's still quite a long way off. More and more people have broadband, more and more people are wanting to use it to its full potential. More and more people are discovered the wonders of downloading films quickly and easily; until there are some viable, legal alternatives, the MPAA is facing an uphill struggle in shutting down BitTorrent trackers.

Neowin's Tom Graham contributed to this report

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