This morning, it was reported that Electronic Arts has laid off 350 people from a number of departments. According to Kotaku, the areas that were hardest hit today were marketing and publishing. An internal email from EA's Andrew Wilson, also obtained by Kotaku, says that the decision to "streamline decision-making" in these departments began last year. This move also seems to include a push to improve customer support and close offices in Russia and Japan.
"We have a vision to be the World’s Greatest Games Company. "If we’re honest with ourselves, we’re not there right now. We have work to do with our games, our player relationships, and our business.
"Across the company, teams are already taking action to ensure we are creating higher-quality games and live services, reaching more platforms with our content and subscriptions, improving our Frostbite tools, focusing our network and cloud gaming priorities, and closing the gap between us and our player communities.".
"Across the company, teams are already taking action to ensure we are creating higher-quality games and live services, reaching more platforms with our content and subscriptions, improving our Frostbite tools, focusing our network and cloud gaming priorities, and closing the gap between us and our player communities.".
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.
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.
Some employees told Kotaku that the layoffs have been expected for some time now, dating as far back as October 2018.
Good call. Does it really take more than one person to formulate the Official Release Schedule? I mean any psych ward patient could do that and be paid in candy, and it doesn't take entire departments to sneak loot boxes into their releases post-launch. They already have sneaky arseholes, otherwise known as the Board.