Always fun to develop a record-selling game. You lose your job as a thanks! 🤮
“The game is finished. You are of no use to us any longer, peasants. Begone!”
I’ve basically just stopped buying AAA games at this point. They are invariably worse quality than indie and AA titles and filled with microtransactions and other predatory bullshit, and the icing on the shit-filled cake is that by buying them you are legitimizing this kind of behavior.
There are just so many good games to play across so many genres that there is no reason whatsoever to buy them, and buying indie games you can feel good about supporting a small dev.
It is especially upsetting to see this news because I remember playing a crapton of Bad Company 2 with my friends in school. All of us got BF3 on launch and played it to death. 4 came out and I know people really liked it but to me it wad just an overly streamlined 3, 1 was cool but a bit too arcadey for me, 5 had no soul and 2042 was clearly just a joke. I hate seeing franchises I loved die through corpo bullshit but there’s plenty of other, better, tastier fish in the sea.
They chew you, then spit you out. We’re basically gum.
Ea Nasir wouldn’t do that!
Are games the new copper?
Always enshittification. Always this is a symptom of late-stage capitalism. The fucks in suits constantly seeking profit.
Anyone who’s other than a suit will have to consider learning the trades as a backup, instead of having to chase the next open tech job.
Did your game do poorly? Straight to unemployment.
Did your game do very well? Believe it or not, straight to unemployment.
Under-sell over-sell
Your game did so-so? Also: straight to unemployment.
Reference for the poor unknowing:
Turns out when you make a 100 million active player target it doesn’t get hit and they use it as an excuse to fire you. GG.
It’s like the movies industry but here there’s still some consumers that pretend to care
Classic modern tech company formula. If any records or targets are broken, mass layoffs must happen.
I think MBA schools have forgotten the golden rule of economics: you get what you incentivise for. Guaranteed unemployment isn’t it.
This is, unfortunately, just typical of the gaming industry in general.
Effectively for all these game studios, everyone is on contract for the duration of the project. Once that finishes, they fire everyone and let them compete for the next contract. Because the game industry is highly competitive and having “EA” on your resume is impressive, they can get away with this behavior as they can always find more bodies to work. It allows EA to continually pay shit and have a bad working environment because people yern to do something creative.
I don’t think contractors count towards “layoffs”.
You make good points about them being contractors and the CV aspects. I’d not thought of that.
But it’s not just in gaming. It’s all of the tech space, or at least those run by American companies, and applies to full time staff. The last decade or so of my tech career is a mirror image of it.
Though it’s hard to tell if it’s layoff FOMO, AI changes, or AI being used as an excuse. Something’s changed in recent years.
Something’s changed in recent years.
Ever since that fucking idea of the lootbox.
I’ve heard the same. If you’re in the games industry and you finish shipping usually you’re laid off and then you move on to the next project. When a new battlefield comes along they’ll just start hiring everyone again whether they worked on the last one or not. It’s not really a long-term strategy but they don’t care. It’s about short-term gains.
“EA is EA, even if you fried it with butter.”
Battlefield 6 was the best-selling game in the U.S. in 2025.
Wow that’s surprising to me considering how it required Secure Boot enabled, which bricked a lot of people’s PCs. I installed the beta for my son and thought “there’s no fucking way the average gamer is going to be able to do this.”
They were probably relying on obnoxious Windows 11 install prompts to carry most of the fight there.
Sadly, in my case it just moved me to Linux…
An average teen gamer would move their entire family on Linux if it meant they get their digital crack.
EA execs to the employees:
Thanks for making us a lot of money, unfortunately, we need it more than you, our yacht fuel is expensive. We have to let some of you go. We hope you understand. As a token of our appreciation here’s a copy of BF6 and Year 1 Season Pass! Fu… err thank you for all your hard work and dedication.
That would be nice
As someone who worked in the industry, I can say you often had to FIGHT to get your name in the game credits. And you were lucky if you got a copy of whatever you made, if you did it was months later (likely long after you went and bought a copy because you wanted to play with your friends).
You certainly would not get any free digital content. Maybe a shirt or baseball hat if there were any left over from the launch party (that you weren’t invited to because it’s only for upper management and investors).
Well shit, here I thought I was window dressing the severance package, but I guess it’s actually something they’d enjoy.
They already broke the record, they won’t be needing those peons anymore.
Doesn’t EA do this after pretty much every major release? Bring in a ton of part-timers and consultants in the rush to release. Go live with a buggy half-assed product. Fire most of the team to save costs. Then coast on marketing and DLC for a few years, before you kick off the next dev cycle and do it again?
AI games. Fuck over everything.
Battlefield was already refried slop before LLM development was a thing.
