Kotaku has revealed that video game publisher EA is laying off 350 employees from its three departments. This is the most layoff in the video game industry further increasing the number of employees laid off from video game companies in the last few months. This further shows that even in big companies, employees are not safe from being laid off.
EA is laying off people from its marketing, publishing and analytics department. EA issued a statement to Kotaku detailing the main cause of the layoff. You can check it out below.
Today we took some important steps as a company to address our challenges and prepare for the opportunities ahead. As we look across a changing world around us, it’s clear that we must change with it. We’re making deliberate moves to better deliver on our commitments, refine our organization and meet the needs of our players. As part of this, we have made changes to our marketing and publishing organization, our operations teams, and we are ramping down our current presence in Japan and Russia as we focus on different ways to serve our players in those markets. In addition to organizational changes, we are deeply focused on increasing quality in our games and services. Great games will continue to be at the core of everything we do, and we are thinking differently about how to amaze and inspire our players.
This is a difficult day. The changes we’re making today will impact about 350 roles in our 9,000-person company. These are important but very hard decisions, and we do not take them lightly. We are friends and colleagues at EA, we appreciate and value everyone’s contributions, and we are doing everything we can to ensure we are looking after our people to help them through this period to find their next opportunity. This is our top priority.
EA has now joined the list of different developers which laid off their employees in the previous months. Most of the developers were small or having serious financial troubles and it made sense. EA, on the other hand, has been reporting massive profits over the past years and being such a huge company, one would never think about EA laying off employees.
In any circumstances, layoffs are never good for the masses and a lot of people are rendered jobless in the process. We hope that all employees who were laid off find decent jobs soon and we wish them good luck for their future endeavors.
