Generally speaking, EA is a company that’s easy to hate. They release rehashes of the same game year on year, they mishandle the Star Wars license and just don’t seem to care. I’m not saying I don’t enjoy their games, but as a company, they are often lazy.
They hit headlines earlier in the year after announcing they would lay off a quarter of the staff from their Australian based acquisition, Firemonkeys Studios. Things seem to be repeating themselves as today it has come to light that EA will lay off 350 people from their marketing, publishing and analytics departments, closing offices in Russia and Japan.
Following the news EA made a statement to Kotaku:
“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.”
Regardless of what you think of EA as a company, it’s never nice seeing employees lose their jobs and hopefully those affected will find other roles quickly. EA has made a follow-up statement in which they’ve said they will look to find other roles for employees within the company and will give severance pay and other resources to those who have to leave.
Hopefully, EA does deliver on their promise to deliver on their commitments and we, as the players, see some good things come from them. After all, that’s all your average gamer wants.
