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Electronic Arts are laying off roughly 670 employees, or 5% of its workforce and has reportedly cancelled a number of upcoming projects including Respawns Star Wars first person shooter.
EA CEO Andrew Wilson blames the job cuts on ”accelerating industry transformation where player needs and motivations and changed significantly”
He also confirmed that going forward EA will be moving away from licensed IP and concentrating on owned IP, sports titles and games with ”massive online communities”.
EA becomes the third company to lay off a large number of staff this week alone after Until Dawn developers Supermasive Games announced plans to let 90 of its staff go and Sony who are cutting 8% of its staff.
For those keeping score the total layoffs in the first 59 days of 2024 currently stand at a worrying 7,800 people.
For comparison the estimated job loses in the gaming industry for all of 2023 was 10,500.
Are we possibly heading for a second video game crash? Perhaps not on the scale of the video game crash of 1983 in the US but it’s clear that the industry is going to have to change, and change dramatically if it intends to survive.
There’s no crash, all these companies turned over massive profits, they just want more profits. With more people buying any old shit, they can afford to make less games and just fill them with battle passes/MTX etc.
They don’t need creativity anymore, so they can chop that part out of their business. The average quality of game people will buy is at an all time low.
Yeah, it doesnt even make sense. Theyd be laying off people because of a crash, not a crash being caused by layoffs.
And as you said, theyre bringing in massive profits, gaming has never been more popular. Theyre all just trying to bring in some easy profits by not having to spend any money on labor costs. But I think theyre all shooting themselves in the foot with their shortsightedness.