Carighan MaconarEA Lays Off Staff Across All Battlefield Studios Following Record-Breaking Battlefield 6 Launch - IGN
hoshikarakitaridiaAlright fk EA with a rusty spoon
GameOverFlowThey just give up to fix the game. Pathetic.
QuentinCallaghan“EA is EA, even if you fried it with butter.”
BrewchinClassic 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.
lechekaflanSomething’s changed in recent years.
Ever since that fucking idea of the lootbox.
lorty
ScrubblesI’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.
I don’t think contractors count towards “layoffs”.
You know, a few months before I was laid off at my previous job, they did announce record-breaking year-over-year profits.
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.
DevolutionAI games. Fuck over everything.
UnderpantsWeevilBattlefield was already refried slop before LLM development was a thing.
EA execs to the employees:
Thanks for making us a lot of money, unfortunately, we need it more than you, our yacht fuel is expensive. We have to let some of you go. We hope you understand. As a token of our appreciation here’s a copy of BF6 and Year 1 Season Pass! Fu… err thank you for all your hard work and dedication.
That would be nice
As someone who worked in the industry, I can say you often had to FIGHT to get your name in the game credits. And you were lucky if you got a copy of whatever you made, if you did it was months later (likely long after you went and bought a copy because you wanted to play with your friends). You certainly would not get any free digital content. Maybe a shirt or baseball hat if there were any left over from the launch party (that you weren’t invited to because it’s only for upper management and investors).
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?
Yeah, but we’re on 6
madjo
jballsBattlefield 6 was the best-selling game in the U.S. in 2025.
Wow that’s surprising to me considering how it required Secure Boot enabled, which bricked a lot of people’s PCs. I installed the beta for my son and thought “there’s no fucking way the average gamer is going to be able to do this.”
An average teen gamer would move their entire family on Linux if it meant they get their digital crack.
They were probably relying on obnoxious Windows 11 install prompts to carry most of the fight there.
Sadly, in my case it just moved me to Linux…
What do you mean sadly? That’s great news
bricked a lot of people’s PCs
Did the definition of “brick” in this context change recently, or did secure boot literally destroy people’s hardware?
I had to put a jumper on the motherboard to do a hard BIOS reset on my son’s PC, and format the hard drive and do a fresh OS install. There are reddit threads and YouTube videos of people doing the same. I consider that bricked, but I suppose your definition could be more extreme.
socsaI’m sure they just understand the problems with glorifying warfare in video games marketed to children.
etherphon
Ricky RigatoniDid your game do poorly? Straight to unemployment.
Did your game do very well? Believe it or not, straight to unemployment.
Your game did so-so?
Also: straight to unemployment.
Reference for the poor unknowing:
Parks and Rec - funny jail scene
Our C-Suite bonuses are high… because of unemployment.
Under-sell over-sell
Luminous5481 "Lawless Heathen" [they/them]They already broke the record, they won’t be needing those peons anymore.
SalamenceFuryTurns 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.
It’s like the movie industry but here there’s still some consumers that pretend to care
Always enshittification. Always this is a symptom of late-stage capitalism. The fucks in suits constantly seeking profit.
Anyone who’s other than a suit will have to consider learning the trades as a backup, instead of having to chase the next open tech job.
I’ve basically just stopped buying AAA games at this point. They are invariably worse quality than indie and AA titles and filled with microtransactions and other predatory bullshit, and the icing on the shit-filled cake is that by buying them you are legitimizing this kind of behavior.
There are just so many good games to play across so many genres that there is no reason whatsoever to buy them, and buying indie games you can feel good about supporting a small dev.
TruscapeMost of the devs from the Bad Company era left EA to form Embark Studios - maybe check out their games like The Finals?
the finals is dope, arc raiders too
idk, but also don’t care, Im enjoying playing it
I was very interested in The Finals when it was announced but something about it after it released kinda turned me off. Arc Raiders I definitely want to try though.
The Battlefield series are the only games I played from EA. I stopped after 4.
Depends what you define as “AAA”
Baldurs Gate 3, for instance, has no nonsense, and every word out of the director’s mouth is “we made this decision because it’s what our developers wanted.” But while the dev team is “AAA” large, Larian doesn’t really fit the mould of Ubisoft, EA, Rockstar, Blizzard or whatever.
I think we need a new designation for what are basically megacorp operations.
I think they self-defined themselves as AAAA because infinite growth has infected their every thought so the number of As must go up too
Wasn’t that ubisoft? I might be mistaken though.
I mean honestly aaa at this point to me kinda has an ironic meaning. It just refers to big budget shit titles that have tons of marketing behind them. I would never refer to an actually good game as aaa because the vast majority of aaa studios make bad, buggy, unfinished, and overpriced.
So we call them what they are: megacorp games!
I just don’t like the term “AAA.” It feels like these mega studios are hiding behind that as a badge of quality.
No1EA is cancer. Don’t ever buy from them - you’ll get fucked