EA Is 'Restructuring', Laying Off Around 6% of Total Workforce

Outside of Madden I really don't know what EA even makes anymore to be honest.

This is the actual statement by EA:

We're making a lot of money, but our overlord, the esteemed shareholders, demand that we make even more more money.

To please our exalted shareholders, we've decided to get rid of some of our most disposable and replaceable 'assets'; employees.

It's a tough sacrifice, but it's one that the (unaffected) executive team is willing to make.

@N1ghtW1ng Sounds like a good (real) response.

Many are calling it ''Dot Com Bust 2.0''. Mass lay-off's in the tech industry are far and wide right now, from the mega corps to the ''mom and pops''.
The pandemic and cost of living seems to be a major factor, but I also think its just plain old oversaturation of the market. There is simply too much stuff to buy from too many different companies to keep all of these people in business.

@N1ghtW1ng
I think it’s worse than that. They aren’t even really considering the employees’ costs so much. I read “move away from “projects that don’t contribute to our strategy”” as “ cancel games that aren’t full of Microtransactions and gambling mechanics”, and that means firing everyone working on actual games.

@LifeGirl They just found out that there is nothing like unending growth and by getting rid of the most important part of your workers you can cash in for a extra year.

@thefourfoldroot1

Y'know, within a business environment, labour is usually the most expensive cost, but it's also the most productive resource a company has.

So by retrenching staff, the company sees it as a way to reduce costs in a massive way.

However, the games that they didn't cancel aren't going to develop themselves. This means that the staff that wasn't retrenched will probably have an increased workload, negatively impacting productivity.

This will never happen, but if a company wants to downsize or restructure or whatever corporate buzzword is used, the cost cutting should start at the top, not at the bottom.

Whilst no-one wants to hear about people losing jobs, we don't really know who is affected, why they are 'selected' and what this could mean for 'us' as consumers.

Its possible that most jobs lost aren't 'Developers' - certainly not those 'key' to EA's Studio's. Maybe some are things that catering or cleaning staff for example as more staff now 'work from home' so don't use the catering or need the cleaning staff they once had.

Maybe some of the staff are those that arrange and organise 'events' like E3 but as they don't intend to have a booth at any event, they don't need all those staff involved in that.

As I said, its not great to hear about loss of jobs for anyone regardless - but that doesn't mean that we as consumers of EA products will 'suffer' as a result. I just hope that they are all able to find a job soon.

Really think once the Activision deal goes through there's going to be a lot of layoffs at Activision and Microsoft.

@N1ghtW1ng You pretty much spelled out exactly what I was going to say.

Big game publishers — and other huge tech companies — made billions upon billions of dollars more than they did pre-pandemic. People were stuck at home more, so of course they spent more money on electronic entertainment. So the companies hired more people to help meet the demand.

Now that things have returned to semi-normal, the companies are now making just the billions they made before. And when the investors and shareholders don’t see growth, they get antsy, and that makes the publisher worried that they might see a dip in their stock prices.

So what do management do? Reduce their exuberant salaries or cut back their millions of dollars in bonuses? Hell no! They cut back on the workforce, destroying people’s livelihoods, just to appease the inflated expectations of modern capitalism.

They no longer need anyone to paste the word FIFA on to box art, marketing etc 😱

EA is in for a tougher year though, I imagine, so this was kind of expected. Always a bummer, when the exec's will keep raking it in, but that's the society we've created and keep accepting 🫥

Restructure the Need for Speed series.

@Grimwood I legit forgot that they produced those.

@Grimwood

I'm not known as the Paragon of Virtues and the Ayatollah of Socialism for nothing.