EA confirms layoffs for Battlefield Studios, even with Battlefield 6’s record sales

EA are making redundancies on the mixed Battlefield Studios groups, together with members of DICE, Criterion, Ripple Impact and Motive Studios.

IGN reports that people are being knowledgeable of a “realignment” throughout the studios, affecting varied groups, although all 4 studios will stay open. We hope these affected are capable of finding new work quickly.

The size of the layoffs is unknown, however in a press release to IGN, an EA spokesperson stated, “We’ve made choose modifications inside our Battlefield group to raised align our groups round what issues most to our neighborhood. Battlefield stays one among our largest priorities, and we’re persevering with to put money into the franchise, guided by participant suggestions and insights from Battlefield Labs.”

All of that is regardless of Battlefield 6 actually placing a chord with shooter followers final yr, setting records for the series in terms of sales and having fun with a way more beneficial reception than Black Ops 7.

Nevertheless, the sport’s efficiency and neighborhood sentiments haven’t been fairly so rosy since then. Even at launch, it was broadly accepted that the single player campaign is weak, and that the sport was missing within the sorts of huge scale maps that the sequence was beforehand recognized for.

Whereas DICE has made changes to the sport, pretty quickly reducing the Challenges grind, however they ended up delaying Season 2 by a month, and even then have stated that they’re unable to produce more than two maps per season. I can’t think about that layoffs are going to enhance the corporate output, EA…

In that point, the participant rely has dropped – per SteamDB, the Steam headcount peaked at 750,000 concurrent round launch, however now tends to hover round 60-70,000. Lifetime consumer critiques of the sport have additionally slid right down to ‘Blended’ on Steam, with basic dissatisfaction at post-launch help.

We’d have hoped that the beginning gross sales and success may need purchased Battlefield Studios extra leeway, however there’s additionally nothing to say {that a} “realignment” wasn’t going to happen at the moment anyway. The peaks and troughs of hiring and layoffs have plagued sport studios for many years, and whereas stay companies have helped to shift that considerably, it hasn’t at all times.

Regardless of the underlying purpose, the hundreds upon hundreds of layoffs we’ve seen the previous few years have been terrible to see. With EA set to be bought up by the Saudi PIF, I suppose they’ve received a reputation to maintain.

Supply: IGN