More Layoffs in a Tumultuous Year for the Industry
Mega-publisher Electronic Arts has reportedly laid off 350 employees across various departments, cutting a grand total of 4% of its workforce.
According to a report from Kotaku (which was later confirmed by EA), 350 employees in the marketing and publishing departments were let go and offices were closed in Russia and Japan following a “difficult quarter.” In the email to employees, CEO Andrew Wilson wrote “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.” You can check out a full statement right here:
“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.”
A pretty interesting revelation considering Apex Legends had the most financially successful free-to-play launch in history, and despite a rocky launch, Anthem didn’t do too shabby either, but not too shocking considering the company had a less successful Q3 than anticipated. That being said, they probably collectively made less than the total budget for just one of those games, but from the sounds of it, they could stand to shave a bit off of their CEO’s salary to make up for the loss.