Electronic Arts Cuts 6% Of Its Workforce
| Tags: Apex Legends, Battlefield 2042, EAFC, General
| Author Timo Reinecke
Gaming giant Electronic Arts lays off approximately 800 members of its workforce amidst operation “from a position of strength”. Read all the details here!
After the recent wave of layoffs that rippled through the industry, FIFA and Apex Legends publisher Electronic Arts (EA) is now cutting 6% of its workforce.
In big tech, it's nothing unusual for big companies to slim down the fat before the end of the fiscal year but at this point, it is getting a bit absurd. The announcement of the layoffs came by nonother than CEO Andrew Wilson in a blog post earlier today.
There he praised the development teams for supporting FIFA, Apex Legends, and The Sims while the critically acclaimed Dead Space Remake was suspicious without mention.
According to Andrew Wilson, the reasons for those layoffs are reconstruction efforts of some of their teams after reviewing their “real estate footprint”. Anyone who didn't find a home in a new development team would receive severance pay and additional benefits as compensation.
This comes in the wake of the publisher laying off more than 200 members of their QA staff at their Louisianna office Baton Rouge last month. That news came in the wake of the announcement that Apex Legends Mobile would shut down its operations on May 1.
Back then, the reason given was that “As part of our ongoing global strategy, we are expanding the distribution of our Apex Legends testing team and ending testing execution that's been concentrated in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, impacting services provided by our third-party provider.”
Since then, some of the QA staffers at the Baton Rouge facility have implied that they were laid off after they made an effort to unionize. Their positions have reportedly been outsourced to third-party QA services in the United Kingdom and Romania.
EA Layoffs, its implications, and the near future of Electronic Arts
So in the wake of the most recent layoffs, you can expect them to announce some of their projects to be either canceled or that we'll hear of titles that have never been announced in the first place.
One of the reasons for the Layoffs could be the Dead Space Remake underperforming sales expectations. While there are no official numbers, data gathered by GamesIndustry suggest that it sold half the numbers its spiritual successor Callisto Protocol sold back in January.
But there is no solid info on Dead Space Remake's overall performance. The publisher was sending out surveys to gauge interest in a remake of other titles of the series might imply that the title performed within expectations but we'll know once they'll close out their financial year later this month.
That month will potentially start strong with the release of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor on April 28, which is the follow-up to the critically acclaimed Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
Its developer Respawn Entertainment has been hiring new unannounced projects that may or may not be affected by the layoffs.
Then there is FIFA which will be renamed to EA Sports FC going forward after Electronic Arts and the Fifa couldn't come to a new license agreement.
We also don't know what the future of Swedish studio EA DICE will look like after the underwhelming launch of the recent Battlefield 2042 and if they had been affected by staff changes. But chances are we'll find out once E3 season approaches.
The new Need for Speed: Unbound was also released to quiet fanfare a few months ago and may have contributed to the layoffs. That game had also just been pushed out into the aether with little to no marketing whatsoever.
However the situation evolves, we keep you updated here on ESTNN