In Shakespeare’s Anthony And Cleopatra, said famous woman says “Give to a gracious message an host of tongues, but let ill tidings tell themselves when they be felt.” I.e., when you have good news you can go round the houses, but if you have bad news – like sending an all-hands email to the staff at EA to let them know that, less than a year after the last round of layoffs, a further 5% of them are getting booted – then you should just come out and say it as quickly and simply as possible.
This is, apparently, not a sentiment ever internalised by Andrew Wilson, EA’s CEO. Yesterday, when he announced to everyone at EA that a bunch of them were losing their jobs (again), he first spent three paragraphs talking about how EA is doing great, leading the industry, getting increasing engagement from fans, optimising their global footprint and sunsetting games oh yep, there it is, that’s the “you’re about to be unemployed” language right there. The company is moving away from “the development of future licensed IP” and toward “our owned IP, sports, and massive online communities”. Therefore: 670 ish devs (by Eurogamer’s count) must go.
In another message, EA’s president of EA entertainment and technology Laura Miele revealed that, related to this, they’ve cancelled the Star Wars FPS game Respawn were working on, though it sounds like a new Jedi game is in the works. They’ve also entirely shut down the Battlefield standalone single-player studio Ridgeline, after game director Marcus Lehto left (under his own steam).
It’s sort of bleakly funny to announce you’re focusing on online communties when everyone has just decided they have live service fatigue. I’m not sure that EA are in the best position vis. their own IP, either. A lot of the devs they jettisoned in 2023 were veterans at BioWare, meaning deep bites have been taken out of the knowledge base on some of EA’s most famous franchises. I’m not best placed to talk about sports stuff, but I understand players of sports games never have any complaints and there are no simmering issues that may snowball into huge problems one day.
If you want to feel your intelligence be mildly insulted by reading 500 words of business-speak-that-seems-quite-disingenuous-when-you-get-right-down-to-it, Wilson’s message has been shared on EA’s official website. The bit where he says people will be let go doesn’t actually even say that. The quote is: “In this time of change, we expect these decisions to impact approximately 5 percent of our workforce. I understand this will create uncertainty and be challenging for many who have worked with such dedication and passion and have made important contributions to our company.”
I really hate the “our business is doing better than ever, which is why we’re getting rid of nearly 700 people” style of messaging, but I guess if executives said “listen, we didn’t grow sustainably during the pandemic and just massively overhired, so we’re having to scale back so our books still show financial growth”, then they might have to suffer some consequences themselves.
I’m sorry, I just get a bit more angry every time I have to write one of these up. There have already been loads of layoffs this year already. Just this week there was bad news for studios at Sony, and from Supermassive Games. Check the layoffs tag to enter the sad zone.