Apart from layoffs, EA also plans to discontinue certain games|Richard Cabrera|CC BY 2.0
Electronic Arts (EA), the company behind popular video games, including Battlefield, Madden NFL, and The Sims, recently announced it will lay off approximately 5% of its workforce less than a year after it let go of 800 employees.
While the exact number wasn’t specified, the layoffs could potentially affect over 600 of EA’s 13,400 workers. CEO Andrew Wilson said the company plans to focus and expand on its most lucrative games and discontinue underperforming ones. The company will also cease development on game IPs unlikely to succeed.
Not just EA
The company’s move reflects a bigger picture of widespread job cuts prevalent in the gaming industry since last year.
Newzoo, an industry tracker, reported that worldwide consumer expenditure on video games largely remained flat last year, following the first decline in over 10 years in 2022.
Just over the past year
- Epic Games reduced its workforce by 830 positions.
- Riot Games, a subsidiary of Tencent, announced plans to lay off 11% of its employees.
- Microsoft revealed it will cut 1,900 jobs across its Activision Blizzard and Xbox gaming divisions.
- Earlier this week, Sony announced its decision to reduce its global workforce by 8% as part of a restructuring process—resulting in roughly 900 job cuts.
The gaming industry’s growth, which heated up in the initial stages of the pandemic, has since cooled.