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! 🤮

  • Ricky Rigatoni@piefed.zipEnglish
    249·
    11 days ago

    Did your game do poorly? Straight to unemployment.

    Did your game do very well? Believe it or not, straight to unemployment.

  • Brewchin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    133·
    11 days ago

    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.

    • cogman@lemmy.worldEnglish
      68·
      11 days ago

      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.

      • Brewchin@lemmy.worldEnglish
        40·
        11 days ago

        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.

        • lorty@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          10 days ago

          Interest rates are higher so companies have a higher pressure to turn big profits instead of other metrics of success.

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
        10·
        11 days ago

        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.

    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      10 days ago

      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

      • Brewchin@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        9 days ago

        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.

        • ipkpjersi@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          7 days ago

          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.

  • afromustache@lemmy.worldEnglish
    741·
    11 days ago

    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.

    It is especially upsetting to see this news because I remember playing a crapton of Bad Company 2 with my friends in school. All of us got BF3 on launch and played it to death. 4 came out and I know people really liked it but to me it wad just an overly streamlined 3, 1 was cool but a bit too arcadey for me, 5 had no soul and 2042 was clearly just a joke. I hate seeing franchises I loved die through corpo bullshit but there’s plenty of other, better, tastier fish in the sea.

    • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      131·
      10 days ago

      Most of the devs from the Bad Company era left EA to form Embark Studios - maybe check out their games like The Finals?

    • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      10 days ago

      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.

      • wraithcoop@programming.devEnglish
        6·
        10 days ago

        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

      • afromustache@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        10 days ago

        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.

        • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          9 days ago

          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.

  • No1@aussie.zoneEnglish
    49·
    11 days ago

    “The game is finished. You are of no use to us any longer, peasants. Begone!”

    • Kennystillalive@feddit.orgEnglish
      131·
      10 days ago

      The problem is, they serve the audience garmer non gamer: all sports simulation like: FIFA, NBA, NHL, Madden etc are with them and then games like Battlefield. I know a bunch of people that play these games, but don’t consider themselves as gamers and give 0 fucks how the industrie is doimg.

    • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.worldEnglish
      71·
      10 days ago

      I think at this stage it’s children who are easily impressionable and using their parent’s credit cards to buy EA games, is the company’s customer base. EA hasn’t produced a good game for a long awhile. Battlefield games had been the only games I played much before 2020, but since then I stopped caring about EA.

      • P1k1e@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        10 days ago

        Nah, plenty of grown ass adults who don’t care, don’t notice or think this counts as progress

      • firepenny@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        10 days ago

        I’ll admit I still give them money as they have a few of my favorite franchises I grew up with, ME Dragon age, Dead Space.

        And these are all turning to shit, besides Dead Space. That was great.

  • Soulphite@reddthat.comEnglish
    29·
    11 days ago

    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.

    • CascadianGiraffe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      11 days ago

      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).

      • Soulphite@reddthat.comEnglish
        4·
        11 days ago

        Well shit, here I thought I was window dressing the severance package, but I guess it’s actually something they’d enjoy.

  • SalamenceFury@piefed.socialEnglish
    24·
    11 days ago

    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.

  • jballs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    263·
    11 days ago

    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.”

    • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      11 days ago

      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…

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      2·
      10 days ago

      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?

      • jballs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        10 days ago

        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.

        • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          2·
          10 days ago

          I didn’t know it was that bad. I have seen people using brick to mean they just had to reinstall the OS

  • JcbAzPx@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    10 days ago

    That’s how they keep wages low. After the crunch, they fire anyone they might have to give a raise to. Next game they hire a bunch of new grunts for next to nothing and repeat.

  • vane@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    10 days ago

    I want to thank you all for making this great game that put us on top last year, but as we’re already 3 months in 2026, our management have no clue how to drive this success into bigger one so we went for easy profit. I think we all agree that EA is great company that deserves more this year and sometimes more is less. I wish you all best of luck in looking for next job. Let’s make EA great again.

  • TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.caEnglish
    19·
    10 days ago

    I’ve had a personal boycott against EA (and Ubisoft, Activision, etc) for over 10 years now and time and time again I get reminded how good of an idea it was.

    Also helped by the fact that EA titles are like $100 now and I’d much rather burn that money for a few minutes of heat than give it to the criminals at EA.

    • glimse@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      10 days ago

      Also helped by the fact that EA games just aren’t that good. Easiest boycott of my life

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      10 days ago

      And if you absolutely must play one of their games, buy used console games, with the added bonus of keeping their kernel anti cheat shit off your PC.

  • Capt. Wolf@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    10 days ago

    EA just doing what it’s always done… Got it.

    That’s always been their practice, use up a team until they don’t think they’ll get anything more from them, then shutter them. You don’t go to work for EA for the job security. You work for them because you need a stepping stone…

    …Or they bought your studio.