EA has responded to reports that it's set to layoff a large percentage of its workforce. According to a rumor originating on Startup Grind, the company is planning to let go between 500 and 1,000 employees this week, which accounts for between 5-11% of total company staff.

Today, EA provided IGN with the following statement:

"EA is growing and looking to hire hundreds of people for our digital, console, mobile and social games. Like all game companies, we make occasional adjustments to resize teams as projects are completed and new priorities are established. Overall, we expect that headcount will be up at the end of this year."

EA last saw a round of major layoffs in late 2009. This new round of rumored cuts comes in the wake of a report from the NPD Group last week that game sales are down in the United States.

Several high profile companies have seen layoffs in recent weeks, with Sony making deep cuts and SEGA letting go entire departments, following a series of layoffs at THQ.

EA did not provide any additional comment, but we'll update this story if any new information comes to light.

Huh, sounds like a certain podcast's idea's on EA...

Linked from IGN: Read the full story here.

Netflix recently published a list of the ten most rented movies of all time. This got us thinking; what are the most downloaded movies on BitTorrent? Today we present the full chart of the top ten most pirated movies transferred via the now ubiquitous protocol, a list headed by Avatar.

Every day millions of people use BitTorrent to download and share movies. But what are all these people downloading?

For nearly half a decade we have compiled weekly and yearly lists of the most popular downloads, and following on from Netflix’s publication of themost rented movies of all time, we today present the equivalent for BitTorrent downloads.

With an estimated 21 million downloads, Avatar is the most pirated movie of all time, followed by The Dark Knight and Transformers with about 19 million downloads each. Interestingly enough, none of the above films were present in Netflix’s list.

The list below is based on statistics is gathered from public BitTorrent trackers, dating back to early 2006. As BitTorrent’s usage was only a fraction of what it is today in the years before, we expect the list below to cover all the most downloaded movies on BitTorrent.

• Avatar (2009)
• The Dark Knight (2008)
• Transformers (2007
• Inception (2010)
• The Hangover (2009)
• Star Trek (2008)
• Kick-Ass (2010)
• The Departed (2006)
• The Incredible Hulk (2008)
• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007)

See the article HERE!