EA is laying off an unknown number of individuals from across its Battlefield teams, including workers at Criterion, Dice, Ripple Effect, and Motive Studios, IGN understands.
Always fun to develop a record-selling game. You lose your job as a thanks! 🤮
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?
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.
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).
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.
I’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.
You know, a few months before I was laid off at my previous job, they did announce record-breaking year-over-year profits right after I built them a new site, and then they laid me off a few months after that.
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.
Battlefield 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.”
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.
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Alright fk EA with a rusty spoon
They just give up to fix the game. Pathetic.
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?
DICE didn’t use to do that for BFV, BF1, or even Battlefront 2.
Yeah, but we’re on 6
EA execs to the employees:
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).
Well shit, here I thought I was window dressing the severance package, but I guess it’s actually something they’d enjoy.
I’m sure they just understand the problems with glorifying warfare in video games marketed to children.
Had to scroll all the way to the bottom, it’s disturbing how popular these games are.
Did your game do poorly? Straight to unemployment.
Did your game do very well? Believe it or not, straight to unemployment.
Under-sell over-sell
Your game did so-so? Also: straight to unemployment.
Our C-Suite bonuses are high… because of unemployment.
Reference for the poor unknowing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiyfwZVAzGw
“EA is EA, even if you fried it with butter.”
Classic 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.
I don’t think contractors count towards “layoffs”.
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.
Interest rates are higher so companies have a higher pressure to turn big profits instead of other metrics of success.
Ever since that fucking idea of the lootbox.
I’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.
You know, a few months before I was laid off at my previous job, they did announce record-breaking year-over-year profits right after I built them a new site, and then they laid me off a few months after that.
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.
Yeah, my manager replaced the team with his friends that he hired. It was just a case of nepotism, nothing I did wrong.
At least I have a 30% higher paying job now than I did back then, and this one actually has bonuses that they pay out too.
edit: Just got my bonus, hell yeah.
AI games. Fuck over everything.
Battlefield was already refried slop before LLM development was a thing.
TrIpLe a game publisher doing Triple A game publisher shit… Who the hell still buys EA games?!
They already broke the record, they won’t be needing those peons anymore.
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.”
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.
I didn’t know it was that bad. I have seen people using brick to mean they just had to reinstall the OS
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
An average teen gamer would move their entire family on Linux if it meant they get their digital crack.
Turns 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.
You can just say capitalism