Despite rave reviews and strong launch sales, Battlefield 6 has lost its lustre in recent months, with its developers now suffering job cuts.
Too often have new video games launched to rave reviews and record-breaking sales, only for the people responsible for making them being put out of work.
Battlefield 6 is the latest example of this. Despite the odds, it managed to dethrone long-time rival Call Of Duty and become the US’ best-selling game of 2025, setting a series record by pushing seven million copies in just three days.
Less than six months since launch, though, and EA has laid off employees across every one of the game’s developers: DICE, Ripple Effect Studios, Criterion Games, and Motive Studio.
It’s currently unknown exactly how many have been let go and no precise reason has been given beyond plans for a ‘realignment.’ Regardless, having less people working on the game can’t be good for Battlefield 6’s long-term health.
In fact, despite having four studios working on it, Battlefield 6 has been met with complaints of a lack of steady content updates (with its second season having to start later than planned) so you’d think EA would want as many hands on deck as possible.
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It’s not just content complaints, though. The honeymoon period for Battlefield 6 seems to have worn off, as Steam user reviews have grown more mixed in recent months, with players complaining about the monetisation and it playing too similarly to Call Of Duty – and free-to-play battle royale spin-off Battlefield Redsec isn’t faring any better.
Battlefield 6’s player count (at least on PC) has also steadily declined from the several hundreds of thousands it had at launch to just tens of thousands. At the time of writing, it’s less popular than the recently released Marathon, as well as several other multiplayer shooters like Arc Raiders, Marvel Rivals, and Overwatch.
The player numbers may be stronger on console, but EA is unlikely to be happy with this decline, especially when it reportedly wanted Battlefield 6 to gain at least 100 million players; a number it’s clearly not reaching any time soon.
It’s easy to assume that these layoffs have to do with EA’s upcoming acquisition by an investor group consisting of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners.
As a reminder, the nature of the acquisition means EA will be saddled with $20 billion of debt once the deal is finalised, which is expected to happen in the first quarter of the 2027 financial year (April 2026 to June 2026).
So, EA will want to make that money back somehow and one way of doing that is by laying off employees. Although a report by IGN states that these Battlefield layoffs are unrelated to the acquisition.
Whatever the reason, it’s a depressing reminder that even successful games don’t guarantee job security. It also doesn’t bode well for future Battlefield games, since affected employees will be taking their expertise with them.
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