EA hit with mass layoffs

Ruin

Ruin

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Electronic Arts has announced they’re next in line to fire a large portion of their workforce.
The company is laying off at least 350 staff, which include staff from their marketing, publishing, and operations teams – as well as a reduction of their presence in both Japan and Russia.
CEO Andrew Wilson noted the publisher was taking “important steps as a company to address our challenges and prepare for the opportunities ahead,” which brought on the layoffs that will “impact about 350 roles.”
Here’s the full statement:
Today we took some important steps as a company to address our challenges and prepare for the opportunities ahead. As we look across a changing world around us, it’s clear that we must change with it. We’re making deliberate moves to better deliver on our commitments, refine our organization and meet the needs of our players. As part of this, we have made changes to our marketing and publishing organization, our operations teams, and we are ramping down our current presence in Japan and Russia as we focus on different ways to serve our players in those markets. In addition to organizational changes, we are deeply focused on increasing quality in our games and services. Great games will continue to be at the core of everything we do, and we are thinking differently about how to amaze and inspire our players.
This is a difficult day. The changes we’re making today will impact about 350 roles in our 9,000-person company. These are important but very hard decisions, and we do not take them lightly. We are friends and colleagues at EA, we appreciate and value everyone’s contributions, and we are doing everything we can to ensure we are looking after our people to help them through this period to find their next opportunity. This is our top priority.
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nichegamer.com

Electronic Arts Hit With Massive Layoffs, 350 Staff Fired - Niche Gamer

Electronic Arts has announced they’re next in line to fire a large portion of their workforce. The company is laying off at least 350 staff, which include staff from their marketing, publishing, and operations teams – as well as a reduction of their presence in both Japan and Russia. CEO Andrew...
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This is NOTHING new

EA is well known in the vidya industry for mass layoffs and frequent firings of staff. Most of the time a big project concludes at EA it leads to a mass firing of most of the development staff. Something to be aware of is gamedev is a very expensive high risk investment most of the time so EA cuts a ton of corners in this regard. This is also why they primarily hire inexperienced staff fresh out of colleges since they can pay them less and fire them.
 
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Sword Fighter Super said:
Get woke, go broke?

Is EA woke? I'm not even sure anymore.
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I dont believe its so much because of their wokeness, but because what MacReady said

RJ MacReady said:
It's almost like every AAA publisher is bloated with superfluous employees who are first to the guillotine when the company decides it has to multiply its profits by one million billion percent every fiscal year or they're underperforming.
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Promestein said:
I dont believe its so much because of their wokeness, but because what MacReady said
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Not to mention all the stupid unnecessary cut scenes they love to add in. Cut those back a bit and you'll save tons of money. It's not like they add that much to the game anyway, aside from getting you to figure out how to skip them.
 
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The company is laying off at least 350 staff, which include staff from their marketing, publishing, and operations teams
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It's almost like the game that Marketing and Operations were pushing to be the next big thing turned out to be complete dogshit (Anthem) and the game that got exactly 0 publicity or marketing blew up to be super huge (Apex Legends).

It's also like their publishing department hasn't published anything worthwhile in like 10 years.
 
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To concur with other posters, it should be becoming apparent to EA that the way they marketed their games in years past is becoming ineffective. Why hire hundreds of people in marketing when you can use a fraction of the money used for their salaries and office upkeep and instead pay off YouTube and Twitch personalities to shill for your game. People hate 30 ads in their YT videos but have no problem with watching literal advertising for hours on end if its packaged as a personality playing vidya.

As it is, I doubt this a ""EA IS DOOMED! DOOOOMED I SAY!" scenario. Thanks to Apex, Fifa, and Madden, I'm sure EA is going to be able to float along just fine (unfortunately). As for Bioware, I will be surprised if EA doesn't gut them before the end of 2019.
 
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Ruin said:
View attachment 706815

Electronic Arts has announced they’re next in line to fire a large portion of their workforce.
The company is laying off at least 350 staff, which include staff from their marketing, publishing, and operations teams – as well as a reduction of their presence in both Japan and Russia.
CEO Andrew Wilson noted the publisher was taking “important steps as a company to address our challenges and prepare for the opportunities ahead,” which brought on the layoffs that will “impact about 350 roles.”
Here’s the full statement:

nichegamer.com

Electronic Arts Hit With Massive Layoffs, 350 Staff Fired - Niche Gamer

Electronic Arts has announced they’re next in line to fire a large portion of their workforce. The company is laying off at least 350 staff, which include staff from their marketing, publishing, and operations teams – as well as a reduction of their presence in both Japan and Russia. CEO Andrew...
nichegamer.com nichegamer.com
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Imagine the living hell that is working for EA. Actually we don't have to imagine since devs and other former employees talk about how awful they are going back years. Escaping from them doesn't sound so bad, really.
 
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_blank_ said:
To concur with other posters, it should be becoming apparent to EA that the way they marketed their games in years past is becoming ineffective. Why hire hundreds of people in marketing when you can use a fraction of the money used for their salaries and office upkeep and instead pay off YouTube and Twitch personalities to shill for your game. People hate 30 ads in their YT videos but have no problem with watching literal advertising for hours on end if its packaged as a personality playing vidya.
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I remember as a kid when word of mouth was the most effective way to influence buying a game.

If you build it, they will come.

Just focus on making good games sheesh
 
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I bet the former workers are somewhat relieved to have left this place.
With all the shitty policies, bad reputation and SWJs going rampant they'll surely find a better place to work.

They can put it on their CV: "worked for the worst company in America for x years; and survived"
 
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RJ MacReady said:
It's almost like every AAA publisher is bloated with superfluous employees who are first to the guillotine when the company decides it has to multiply its profits by one million billion percent every fiscal year or they're underperforming.
Click to expand...

There was the guy on Game of Thrones who wanted to know how much he could cut off from a person before they died. I wonder how much fat can be cut from a company like EA before it affects their games or their game development in even the slightest way that can be noticed by the consumer. Ballpark: 30%, thirty percent can be cut and the gaming community would be none the wiser. Madden would still be janky, their NBA games would still be cancelled for being too buggy and BioWare games might actually become better.
 
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Sword Fighter Super said:
Get woke, go broke?

Is EA woke? I'm not even sure anymore.
Click to expand...
No. They’re just as likely to do mass layoffs because they’re bored or want to celebrate Christmas as they are for financial reasons.
The Shadow said:
They're woke when they think it will score them points, i.e. Battlefield and Mass Effect, but not when it comes to labor relations, apparently.
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Mass Effect was never “woke”, that was a myth.
 
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