Mass layoff at EA - cuts 600 jobs

[kleinluka]

EA just announced that they are laying off 6% of their global work force, or about 600 people.

Sad My feelings go out to everyone who is affected by this....

full story:

http://kotaku.com/5071439/electronic-ar ... ix-hundred

Thanks to Mino for telling me about this...

[Minos]

Yeah it's quite sad when big corporations act like this. Blaming this massive layoff on the economic crisis is total bullshit... games sales haven't been affected since the crisis started as far as I know.

I just hope they never acquire Ubisoft...

[Chunks]

I don't want to sound like a jerk, but I mean seriously when you are in the hole and the only way to free up some cash is to lay-off people what can you do?

If you are losing money and are required to scale back you have to cut staff, if you don't you will just run the whole company under which resulting in everyone losing their job. Look at the big picture.

The current economic situation most definitely has something to do with it, however I wouldn't lay all the blame... EA hasn't been doing so great in the past year or so... It's not really a surprise regardless.

edit: also, you must realise every company has holdings in the market. when the market tanks, they lose their net value. Also it is probably harder for EA to finance new games because of the credit crisis therefore in the next year or so they are probably not going to be able to make as much money/publish new products. It would be foolish to say it didn't have something to do with it.

[Furyo]

I have a hard time believing their quarter result is purely consumption based. I would have to look at a more detailed financial report but I have a feeling they just wrote off a lot of investments they had due to the financial crisis and the bottom employee is getting the shaft because of this. This really sounds like a decision taken essentially to please the immediate confidence of the shareholders rather than looking at a longer term strategy. They've been saying for the last year how they want to give the focus back to quality titles, those aren't gonna get made in a company in which employees trust and confidence gets undermined this easily whenever the wind starts blowing the other way.

Games sales supposedly have started to slow down since the financial crisis boiled over. The thing is though, I say supposedly because this started proper so late into the quarter that there is no hard evidence, figures backing this up. Before the public's confidence goes down, it starts with your investments and your market capitalization going way down. And this has happened, and a lot sooner than any sales figures could indicate.

[2d-chris]

Wait an till you run your own company and you will understand. I only understand a little due to picking my dads brain about such subjects.

It's obviously a real shame for who is affected though.

I'd rather have 600 jobs cut than lose EA as a company, I don't think the games industry would recover for quite a while if it happened. I'm not convinced the "credit crisis" is having such a big effect as the media make out, but to say it has nothing to do with the job cuts is a little silly, total game sales are only a portion of the finacial outlook of a billion $ company like EA.

[Furyo]

If a 310 million loss made EA go bankrupt, they'd be the Atari of the industry, and would have been for a long long while. Remember their plan to buy Take Two for 2 billion of their own dollars? (they had planned not to take loans for that one last I checked).

And as far as running companies to know about this, I just happen to still have more experience in marketing and project management than I do as a level designer....

[Hourences]

I don't want to sound like a jerk, but I mean seriously when you are in the hole and the only way to free up some cash is to lay-off people what can you do?

If you are losing money and are required to scale back you have to cut staff, if you don't you will just run the whole company under which resulting in everyone losing their job. Look at the big picture.

Like discussed before, I think it would be a much better idea to streamline your workflow more, and improve your tools. It is unbelievable how much money large game developers waste on endless meetings, delayed decisions, bad designs, redoing things, crappy tools and so on.

Fixing those things would save as much money as getting rid of these (poor) 600 people.

[-HP-]

600 persons?! Damn, that's a lot of people...

I feel for them... And here I was thinking the games industry was the only industry you were safe from the economical crisis!!

[Steppenwolf]

Guess this means even more crunch time for EA employees. But then we dont know what kind of staff is reduced. If they cut it on the management level and make their hirarchys flatter they even might come out as a better company after this. But if it affects artists and designers i dont see how this will help them in the long run.

[Furyo]

Heard along the grapevine this is mostly Pandemic staffers. Wouldn't exactly surprise me down in Brisbane since they canned their Batman game lately, and Mercs 2 and LOTR are done in LA too. Even if Riccitiello said yesterday there would be a Mercs 3, there is no certainty they'd be the guys doing it.

[Taylor]

Ony my grapevine I heard Pandemic were only slightly affected.