EA are making redundancies at the combined Battlefield Studios teams, including members of DICE, Criterion, Ripple Effect and Motive Studios.
IGN reports that individuals are being informed of a “realignment” across the studios, affecting various teams, though all four studios will remain open. We hope those affected are able to find new work soon.
The scale of the layoffs is unknown, but in a statement to IGN, an EA spokesperson said, “We’ve made select changes within our Battlefield organization to better align our teams around what matters most to our community. Battlefield remains one of our biggest priorities, and we’re continuing to invest in the franchise, guided by player feedback and insights from Battlefield Labs.”
All of this is despite Battlefield 6 really striking a chord with shooter fans last year, setting records for the series in terms of sales and enjoying a much more favourable reception than Black Ops 7.
However, the game’s performance and community sentiments haven’t been quite so rosy since then. Even at launch, it was widely accepted that the single player campaign is weak, and that the game was lacking in the kinds of large scale maps that the series was previously known for.
While DICE has made adjustments to the game, fairly quickly reducing the Challenges grind, but they ended up delaying Season 2 by a month, and even then have said that they’re unable to produce more than two maps per season. I can’t imagine that layoffs are going to improve the company output, EA…
In that time, the player count has dropped – per SteamDB, the Steam headcount peaked at 750,000 concurrent around launch, but now tends to hover around 60-70,000. Lifetime user reviews of the game have also slid down to ‘Mixed’ on Steam, with general dissatisfaction at post-launch support.
We would have hoped that the starting sales and success might have bought Battlefield Studios more leeway, but there’s also nothing to say that a “realignment” wasn’t going to take place at this time anyway. The peaks and troughs of hiring and layoffs have plagued game studios for decades, and while live services have helped to shift that somewhat, it hasn’t always.
Whatever the underlying reason, the thousands upon thousands of layoffs we’ve seen the last few years have been awful to see. With EA set to be bought up by the Saudi PIF, I guess they’ve got a reputation to maintain.
Source: IGN
