Always fun to develop a record-selling game. You lose your job as a thanks! 🤮
These layoffs come just months after the unexpected death of Battlefield franchise head Vince Zampella in a car accident. They also come as EA is preparing to be acquired by an investor group composed of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners for approximately $55 billion.
Oh is this one of Mr. Bonesaw’s ventures, or a different thing?
You would think IGN would have budget for basic fact checking but this article was probably written by AIEdit: this was a bad call by me, it turns out everything appears to be accurate. I just was making assumptions based off of outdated informationYou would think that I would do some basic fact checking…
I missed when Vince Z went from Respawn to Dice LA. I retract my claims of AI
Granted, you probably don’t have the IGN budget for it
Alright fk EA with a rusty spoon
AI games. Fuck over everything.
Battlefield was already refried slop before LLM development was a thing.
EA just doing what it’s always done… Got it.
That’s always been their practice, use up a team until they don’t think they’ll get anything more from them, then shutter them. You don’t go to work for EA for the job security. You work for them because you need a stepping stone…
…Or they bought your studio.
Turns out when you make a 100 million active player target it doesn’t get hit and they use it as an excuse to fire you. GG.
That explains why we’re up to about 14 multiplayer game modes at the main menu?
I’ll repeat: 14 goddamned multiplayer options. That’s gonna populate all the servers, right?
Time for everyone else at EA to unionize
Just punishment for making another FPS for a major corporation. Why they expect anything different at this point baffles me
Anyone who gives EA money is an absolute moron and is part of the problem.
I think at this stage it’s children who are easily impressionable and using their parent’s credit cards to buy EA games, is the company’s customer base. EA hasn’t produced a good game for a long awhile. Battlefield games had been the only games I played much before 2020, but since then I stopped caring about EA.
I’ll admit I still give them money as they have a few of my favorite franchises I grew up with, ME Dragon age, Dead Space.
And these are all turning to shit, besides Dead Space. That was great.
Nah, plenty of grown ass adults who don’t care, don’t notice or think this counts as progress
“Congratulations and fuck you !” EA probably.
I want to thank you all for making this great game that put us on top last year, but as we’re already 3 months in 2026, our management have no clue how to drive this success into bigger one so we went for easy profit. I think we all agree that EA is great company that deserves more this year and sometimes more is less. I wish you all best of luck in looking for next job. Let’s make EA great again.
EA new logo is “pay everything”
Enshittify Anything
EA makes the best games when the executives get out of the way. Some developers took all of the assets that they had from Battlefront 2 (which was a gorgeous piece of crap) and made one of the best Star Wars flight sims I’ve ever seen.
I wish we could band together and create a company not with the motive of profit for shareholders, but with the motive of wages for employees.
What if the goal was to hire and pay as many people as much as possible, all while creating something really neat.
How do we start this?
Like some else already said co-ops and employee owned businesses. But they all require capital to start, maybe a bank could give you a business loan.
Maybe a government program that doesn’t have a profit motive like the post office?
Yeah I think a government sponsored program could actually draw a lot of votes, I know Ms. Harris briefly touched on this with her 20k for small business start ups, but its kind of off mark from what I was proposing.
They are called co-ops. Capitalism is fundamentally broken broken, so your idea will not work at larger scales under the current system
Yeh I’m aware of employee owned and co-cooperatively owned companies, but in my experience those are often used as marketing buzzwords.
I think video game development could actually be a space where this could work, but with the saturation of indie and low effort games, a golden opportunity may have already passed.
Step 1: Wake up
Step 2: Realize that people have never been okay with the idea of paying more, they only like to talk about making more (somehow, magically). I feel like rising prices are actually the only thing that can bring down Trump and MAGA, that’s how much people hate it
How exactly and why do you expect people to simply pay more for games so that few people could make more money, likely in a different country? I just don’t see market working like that.
Besides, how would you even start this without investors? Creating a product takes a long time, and you want to pay high wages while the company makes nothing?
Yeah those are great points to consider.
I hope you have a good day.
That’s how they keep wages low. After the crunch, they fire anyone they might have to give a raise to. Next game they hire a bunch of new grunts for next to nothing and repeat.
Doesn’t EA do this after pretty much every major release? Bring in a ton of part-timers and consultants in the rush to release. Go live with a buggy half-assed product. Fire most of the team to save costs. Then coast on marketing and DLC for a few years, before you kick off the next dev cycle and do it again?
DICE didn’t use to do that for BFV, BF1, or even Battlefront 2.
Yeah, but we’re on 6
Classic modern tech company formula. If any records or targets are broken, mass layoffs must happen.
I think MBA schools have forgotten the golden rule of economics: you get what you incentivise for. Guaranteed unemployment isn’t it.
This is, unfortunately, just typical of the gaming industry in general.
Effectively for all these game studios, everyone is on contract for the duration of the project. Once that finishes, they fire everyone and let them compete for the next contract. Because the game industry is highly competitive and having “EA” on your resume is impressive, they can get away with this behavior as they can always find more bodies to work. It allows EA to continually pay shit and have a bad working environment because people yern to do something creative.
You make good points about them being contractors and the CV aspects. I’d not thought of that.
But it’s not just in gaming. It’s all of the tech space, or at least those run by American companies, and applies to full time staff. The last decade or so of my tech career is a mirror image of it.
Though it’s hard to tell if it’s layoff FOMO, AI changes, or AI being used as an excuse. Something’s changed in recent years.
Something’s changed in recent years.
Ever since that fucking idea of the lootbox.
Interest rates are higher so companies have a higher pressure to turn big profits instead of other metrics of success.
I don’t think contractors count towards “layoffs”.
I’ve heard the same. If you’re in the games industry and you finish shipping usually you’re laid off and then you move on to the next project. When a new battlefield comes along they’ll just start hiring everyone again whether they worked on the last one or not. It’s not really a long-term strategy but they don’t care. It’s about short-term gains.
You know, a few months before I was laid off at my previous job, they did announce record-breaking year-over-year profits right after I built them a new site, and then they laid me off a few months after that.
Then again, I’ve been at my current company for a few years now, and they have been announcing record-breaking year-over-year profits over the past 3 years and it’s been fine, so I guess it depends lol
It probably does, and I doubt the difference is anything to do with you. (Beyond not sticking your head above the KPI parapet, etc).
The last place I was laid off from was notorious for a LIFO/stack policy whenever heads needed to roll. The one before that looked purely at the highest earners. And the one before that did whatever the nice vulture capitalists told them to do… or else.
None of them looked at how much you made (or retained) for the company, customer and colleague satisfaction, impact on teams or projects. Just “thought leaders” looking at spreadsheets while telling everyone that they know what they’re doing. And for the IC it’s indistinguishable from Russian roulette.
Yeah, my manager replaced the team with his friends that he hired. It was just a case of nepotism, nothing I did wrong.
At least I have a 30% higher paying job now than I did back then, and this one actually has bonuses that they pay out too.
edit: Just got my bonus, hell yeah.
