EA to layoff 500-1000 employees.

The company will layoff between 500 and 1000 employees, which means 5 to 11% of the total number of employees.

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This may be related to Mass Effect selling only 1.3 million retail copies during the first month (which in my opinion is less than they expected), their expensive buyout of Popcap games and the negative PR generated by being named the Worst Company in America.

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Anyways try to not complain about the company itself that much, I'd love to do so but I doubt mods share this interest...hehe. Better to discuss things like the viability of the current state of the industry and the huge budgets of AAA titles, etc.

Main Source

EDIT: EA sort-of denied it: "”There are no lay-offs as such, we always have projects growing and morphing. At any given time there are new people coming in and others leaving. EA is growing and hiring and building teams to support the growing demand for digital games and services."”

My opinion is that it's PR talk...otherwise they would have just claimed that the article was false.

edited 16th Apr '12 9:56:50 AM by Anfauglith

Is 1.5m for first month really that bad?

Damn, that's a big blow. I feel sorry for all those people getting kicked out. Maybe in 10 years, we'll see an award winning and creative developer, who rose from those ashes! I hope.

I am not sure (thus I said "my opinion") but they had shipped 3.5 million copies.

edited 16th Apr '12 7:55:22 AM by Anfauglith

Because of the horror stories I've heard about EA, I have a feeling that these people may appreciate it.

Please tell me the stories. I really don't pay attention to EA. I'm just shocked that alot of people are getting the boot.

http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/

I have heard that EA's treatment of their employees have gotten a little better, but that may have changed.

This should probably go without saying, but at least try to keep this thread civil, fellas. Yeah, I know this is about EA, but we can discuss this without resorting to straight-up bashing them.

I don't want to turn this into an EA bitching thread so they don't close it, but basically the company is (in)famous for buying smaller companies and ruining them. Lets eh...leave it at that.

Well I wonder if this is EA's fault or if it's something bigger going on with the industry since Obsidian also had to layoff some employees not long ago.

Oh I will update the OP with that information.

”There are no lay-offs as such, we always have projects growing and morphing,” "At any given time there are new people coming in and others leaving. EA is growing and hiring and building teams to support the growing demand for digital games and services."

Anyways the bolded parts strike me as curious. Seems more like PR talk rather than outright saying the article is false.

edited 16th Apr '12 8:20:04 AM by Anfauglith

On the other hand, EA has denied it. I'm pretty sure this is the kind of thing a publicly-listed company has to come out and declare, so I'd take the article with more than a pinch of salt.

Edit: I might also be talking complete bollocks. Could someone with a better understanding of what listed companies have to let shareholders know comment?

edited 16th Apr '12 8:18:41 AM by Falco

Companies have to report any details which may be relevant to their market value. Certainly, planned reductions in staff levels are relevant to that, as they imply poor sales, reduced profitability, a new strategic direction, or other such things.

That said, employment is never static in a big company; staff levels will change all the time, with employees leaving, being sacked for disciplinary stuff, going on extended leave, etc all being regular reasons for people leaving. With a company like EA, which will be highly project based, staff will come and go as required by the scale and needs of different projects, so when one game finishes, its staff may move to another.

Becaue of all that, staff reductions can be engineered so as to happen organically - reduce the number of staff taken on, resulting in a net decrease, for example. Or they could not renew some contracts when a new project starts, or they could try and start a new project with a smaller than intended number of staff, or offer things like voluntary redundancy to encourage people to leave of their own accord.

Without knowing more, it's hard to know what exactly will happen, but "we're going to axe 10% of our staff" doesn't mean simply going through the staff roster and making every 10th person forcibly redundant. There's other ways they can achieve the reductions.

Well, shoot. (Almost) No matter what company, a bunch of people getting laid off is bad.

Also puts EA in a more precarious position than I assumed. Mass Effect 3 got a lot of bad press, some of it legitimate (Face bug, Endings) some of it not (Multiplayer, Gay romance) but I thought it still conquered the sales charts.

edited 16th Apr '12 9:45:30 AM by ShirowShirow

I've heard that there's this one employee who works at Electronic Arts named Icer Addis. This dude got his own page on Wikipedia, which you can read here. I hope he isn't among the 500-1000 employees to be laid off!

It's not good for a hugely hyped 3rd and final installment for a well regarded franchise.

Gears of War 3, a 360 exclusive, sold 5 million copies. That number was more what EA expected from the Mass Effect franchise.

If ME 1 sold that amount then it'd be great cause it'd be a new IP and it's harder to sell a huge amount with a new title, but ME 3 has had several years and a shitload of marketing to build it up so that kind of amount is pretty bad.

Here's a bit of trivia that might interest you: back in September 2011, there are (were?) 7820 employees at Electronic Arts. If they really laid off 1000 employees, that would be losing around 12-13% right there!

Maybe the employees will go on to join more respected and well liked developers. Well you know, silver lining and all that.

Or create their own company.

I'm not sure, is that likely/possible?

Yeah, happened plently of time before.

Example, the employees who left Infinity Ward after the deal fiasco with Activision formed their own company called Respawn Entertainment, I think. My memory is terrible.

And after EA dismantled Westwood, people left to form Petroglyph.

And Jet Set Games.

I love how in that poll, tons of people are like "OMGWTF HOW CAN YOU VOTE EA WORSE THAN AN EVIL BANKING INSTITUTION?!"

There's thousands of banks to choose from who are all willing to hold your money for you.

Unfortunately for gamers, EA is trying to swallow the whole goddamn industry, they've gotten pretty close when it comes to consoles. If you look on a shelf and count the games published by EA, you'd have a pretty high precentage. If my bank starts doing shady shit, I can just pull out and go somewhere else. Unfortunately EA is kind of it. They've got the lions share of the industry in their pocket these days.

About Electronic Arts, there's some good news and some bad news. The good news is they are taking steps to improve life for their employees. The bad news is they may falling into bad habits. This is from reports in 2007-2008, so I'm not quite sure what the status is in 2012.

While EA may have dominated a portion of the Video Games industry (I'm not sure how big this portion is), there is one company they haven't acquired: Nintendo. Frankly, I just don't see EA taking over Nintendo. Nintendo would probably shut down first before being taken over by any company!

It's possible that EA's problems come from the fact that it's too big. Hopefully, laying off 500-1000 employees will make EA smaller...and more manageable!