The past few years have been very promising for gamers as we’ve seen some groundbreaking titles such as Breath of the Wild, Persona 5, Nier Automata, Red Dead Redemption 2 among others. Often times, we forget that an intense amount of labor goes behind forming the products that gamers enjoy everywhere from technical aspects to marketing and advertising. It’s saddening news to hear then that EA fired 350 people in several fields such as Marketing, Publishing, and Analytics.
The news came from Kotaku. When Kotaku reached out to EA, they came forward with the following statement:
EA’s Statement on the Firings
“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.”
The Sentiment of Affected Employees
In an interview with Kotaku, one person in the affected departments told Kotaku that the layoffs were expected for a while now. EA had put hiring and traveling freezes for a long time. The employees in marketing and publishing had seen this coming. And the person reportedly said, “I think some people will be relieved to not be in limbo anymore“.
At the very least, at least EA was transparent about it. It’s always sad to hear that someone lost their job. Let’s hope that these employees find work somewhere else in the industry. Here’s hoping that 2019 becomes a more sustainable year for people who work in the gaming industry to provide us with hours upon hours of entertainment and art.
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