EA has laid off nearly 800 employees, or six percent of its roughly 12,900-person workforce.
Andrew Wilson, the company’s CEO, confirmed the cuts in a blog post on Wednesday.
“As we drive greater focus across our portfolio, we are moving away from projects that do not contribute to our strategy, reviewing our real estate footprint, and restructuring some of our teams,” Wilson wrote of the layoffs. This follows EA’s cuts of 200 Apex Legends QA testers last month, although it’s not clear if EA is counting some or all of those people among the six percent.
However, this all comes just two months after EA reported earning approximately $7 billion USD ($9.47 billion CAD) in net revenue last year, which works out to $5 billion USD ($6.76 billion CAD) in gross profits, an 18 percent year-over-year increase. Meanwhile, Wilson himself earned $19.9 million USD ($26.9 million CAD) in 2022, which was already made to be about half his 2021 salary due to shareholders taking issue with his executive bonuses. For context, EA reported to the SEC that its median employee income for 2022 was $115,569 USD ($156,372 CAD), meaning Wilson makes roughly 172 times more than those who work below him, on average.
In the blog post, Wilson says EA is offering eligible employees other roles within the company and, “where that’s not possible,” providing severance pay and health benefits to others. It’s currently unclear exactly who among EA’s global workforce has been affected by the layoffs. The publisher has several studios in Canada, in particular, including a flagship Vancouver campus (FIFA and NHL), BioWare Edmonton (Mass Effect) and the Montreal-based Motive (this year’s Dead Space).
For now, Wilson is singling out the success of FIFA 23, which he says is pacing to be the franchise’s biggest title, as well as Apex Legends and The Sims. One month from now, the company also has Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the highly-anticipated sequel to 2019’s best-selling Jedi: Fallen Order. Clearly, then, the company isn’t hurting, which makes these layoffs all the more disappointing.
EA’s layoffs follow many other recent cuts in the tech sector, including thousands at Meta, Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
Image credit: EA
Source: EA
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