The video game industry is a volatile place, and job security isn't guaranteed. A few weeks ago, we reported that Activision-Blizzard was laying off roughly a thousand employees due to missed sales targets. Now, it looks like its rival EA is also doing the same. According to a report by Kotaku, EA is letting go of 350 people across marketing, publishing, and other divisions.
Kotaku said that EA head Andrew Wilson characterized the decision as a way to streamline marketing and publishing. You can read part of his email to employees below.
We have a vision to be the world's greatest games company. If we're honest with ourselves, we're not there right now. We have work to do with our games, our player relationships, and our business. Across the company, teams are already taking action to ensure we are creating higher-quality games and live services, reaching more platforms with our content and subscriptions, improving our Frostbite tools, focusing our network and cloud gaming priorities, and closing the gap between us and our player communities.
While this seems like somewhat of a vague statement, Kotaku managed to get a clearer statement from EA this morning. The company said the following.
Today we took some important steps as a company to address our challenges and prepare for the opportunities ahead. As we look across a changing world around us, it's clear that we must change with it. We're making deliberate moves to better deliver on our commitments, refine our organization, and meet the needs of our players. As part of this, we have made changes to our marketing and publishing organization, our operations teams, and we are ramping down our current presence in Japan and Russia as we focus on different ways to serve our players in those markets. In addition to organizational changes, we are deeply focused on increasing quality in our games and services.
Apparently EA is working with the laid-off employees to see if they can fill other positions inside the company. However, it doesn't seem like a lot of positions are open in marketing and publishing based on EA's careers page.
Hopefully those affected will be able to find jobs soon. This is just another example of how cutthroat the video game industry is, and how there needs to be better protection for employees.
