[heliotron]

I'm curious as to how were they able to poach. Money, equity, working conditions, all of these, none of these...?

Working conditions in some of the big companies in the real games industry sound pretty bad to me, but I am only going on lazy reading of articles like "EA spouse", I have no experience in the industry itself. I think I'd be pretty outraged to be on a Farmville death march, for sure.

[pandaman]

I'd guess equity and money. Zynga does not seem to have conditions different from EA (not surprisingly as it's managed by the same people) and EA is not really able to poach somebody with its working conditions.