EA is reportedly laying off up to 100 staff after the company recently announced it would be cutting ties with FIFA.
According to internal emails seen by Kotaku, as many as 100 customer service employees working at EA's Austin office are being made redundant. Many of those affected supported live operations on FIFA 22, with the company reportedly planning to outsource that work instead.
Update:
- EA says Mass Effect 5 is now BioWare's "full focus" as it shuffles devs to other studios, with some reportedly facing layoffs following Dragon Age: The Veilguard's underperformance
- Baldur's Gate 3 dev slams EA's BioWare layoffs as "a short-term cost-saving measure" that "doesn't solve a long-term problem"
In a statement to GamesRadar, an EA spokesperson has clarified that the layoffs are not connected to the recent break with FIFA.
"These changes are not tied to any one gaming franchise, nor are they connected to our EA SPORTS FC announcement last week. The customer support function supports a wide range of player questions pertaining to our gaming titles, technology including Origin, and our EA Play subscription service."
Original story:
In an email sent to staff, Joel Knutson, VP of customer experience at EA, wrote "we continuously evolve to deliver better experiences for our fans and are improving our support model," before telling employees that jobs would be cut "in order to reduce complexity and increase our efficiency, flexibility and scalability." Staff at EA's Galway office are also at risk of losing their jobs as Knutson wrote that he was "proposing redundancy" for similar roles there.
According to a Kotaku source, those being laid off mainly provided email, chat and phone support for FIFA 22 players. An EA representative told the outlet that the "changes" were not connected to any particular franchise. They also denied that the company's actions were related to last week's EA Sports FC announcement. Kotaku's source claims that the layoffs come after staff at EA Austin and Galway repeatedly complained about meagre annual wage increases, which were said to be as little as $0.10 per hour.
The email sent to staff also reportedly revealed that EA has created ten new roles providing customer support for mobile titles, which it's invited the laid off staff to apply for.
FIFA already has multiple games in the works and says that its games will still be "the best" without EA.
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