According to Andrew Wilson, the CEO of Electronic Arts, a 350 person layoff has taken place due to the changing of the video game’s landscape. In this regard, EA’s Tokyo and Russia studios have been hit with said layoff to bring gamers “better” customer service, and video game experiences.
As of today, Wilson released two different letters about the layoff. One to employees and another to the public. The latter is much shorter than the former, which can be found on ea.com.
In addition to the above, you can read over the layoff letter here:
“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. Great games will continue to be at the core of everything we do, and we are thinking differently about how to amaze and inspire our players.
This is a difficult day. The changes we’re making today will impact about 350 roles in our 9,000-person company. These are important but very hard decisions, and we do not take them lightly. We are friends and colleagues at EA, we appreciate and value everyone’s contributions, and we are doing everything we can to ensure we are looking after our people to help them through this period to find their next opportunity. This is our top priority.
— Andrew Wilson, CEO of Electronic Arts”
YouTuber TheQuartering had someone ship him the full layoff letter, which is much longer than the one posted above. You can check out the video here:
The letter to employees by Wilson claims that the goal is to streamline decision-making in the marketing and publishing departments, improve its terrible customer support, and change some of its (international) strategies, which the result calls for offices in Russia and Japan to be closed.
Supposedly, this change will also “improve” the quality of EA games and other stuff too:
[…] we are addressing our need to better execute with a focus on increasing quality in our games and services. Great games will continue to be at the core of everything we do at EA, but we must strive to think differently about how to amaze, inspire and surprise our players. EA Studios has launched new initiatives to reset our framework for delivering quality, drive our creative process, improve the player experience, and set an agenda for disruptive innovation in our games.
With all of that said, EA will hold its next earnings call or Q4 2019 Earnings Conference Call May 7th, 2019. In other words, information on official Anthem sales will be disclosed, which will cover how many copies have sold and if it reached the target number of 6 million copies in six weeks.
If you want more info on this very situation, you can head on over to ea.com.
