Electronic Arts has laid off around 350 employees from its different teams including marketing and publishing, an announcement from the game publisher’s CEO confirmed. The layoffs were part of the company’s plans to “better deliver on our commitments, refine our organization and meet the needs of our players” while also “ramping down” the company’s presence in Japan and Russia. The layoffs follow a string of similar job-impacting instances at EA and other companies such as Activision that have occurred this year.

Kotaku first reported on the layoffs with a statement that was sent to the site by EA which confirmed the reports of the layoffs. Not long after the initial report came out, the same statement from EA’s CEO Andrew Wilson was published on EA’s site and confirmed that the layoffs would “impact about 350 roles.”

The full statement from Wilson can be seen below:

“Today we took some important steps as a company to address our challenges and prepare for the opportunities ahead,” Wilson said. “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 statement continued. “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.”

EA’s studio in Australia was hit with layoffs in February as well. Those layoffs followed the mass layoffs that happened within Activision-Blizzard and resulted in around 800 employees losing their jobs.

The two most recent games from EA include the BioWare-lead Anthem and Apex Legends, the battle royale game set in the Titanfall universe.



Posted: Mar 28, 2019 10:03 am
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://comicbook.com/gaming/2019/03/26/ea-lays-350-employees/