2019 continues to be a garbage yr for job stability within the business, as Electronic Arts have laid off 350 folks, largely in advertising and marketing and publishing, and their abroad workplaces. Kotaku got hold of an internal e-mail to employees from CEO Andrew Wilson stating that the cuts had been to “streamline decision-making in the marketing and publishing departments”. I can solely hope that there’s a equally streamlined path to new jobs obtainable to these areas hit, particularly these in EA’s Japanese and Russian workplaces, that are going through closure.
The silver lining right here is that EA are not less than dealing with the layoffs professionally. Severance will probably be paid, they usually’re “working with employees to try and find other roles within the company”, so hopefully the ultimate variety of folks misplaced will probably be lower than the 350 reported. Per Kotaku’s sources at EA, the layoffs have been anticipated for a while, and there had been a several-month-long hiring freeze. Awful as it’s to lose your job, not less than EA are outfitted to do that proper. EA additionally gave a press release to Kotaku here, together with point out that the corporate employs round 9000 folks.
This comes not lengthy after Activision laid off a massive 800 people just a month ago, solely to then sheepishly inform buyers that it might “negatively impact business”, per Gamespot. We’ve additionally seen layoffs throughout main studios, like Guild Wars 2 studio ArenaNet, and naturally final yr’s tragedy of Telltale’s implosion and the sudden lack of all jobs on the studio. Telltale’s case was particularly terrible as that they had been hiring proper up till the second the corporate collapsed, leaving employees displaced, severance unpaid and lawsuits in opposition to the homeowners nonetheless brewing.
Here’s hoping that there’s no extra main layoffs for the remainder of the yr, however I think there’s nonetheless room for issues to worsen. The business is tightening its belt, with even smaller storefronts like GOG cutting around 10% of their staff with a purpose to stability the books. While it’s common for studios to rent and fireplace to maintain up with manpower calls for throughout improvement, publishers and distributors drastically downsizing seems like a symptom of a bigger illness.
