Alongside the closure of BioWare, the studio behind Dragon Age and Mass Effect, new layoffs are hitting other Electronic Arts teams. According to an internal memo, around 400 employees will lose their jobs, a figure far larger than the roughly 50 people reportedly working at BioWare. The memo did not say which other studios would be affected; the names emerged from LinkedIn posts by people who were laid off.
Among the studios named are Maxis, the team behind The Sims, Full Circle, which works on Skate, and Ripple Effect, which contributed to Battlefield 6 and the Battlefield Portal user-generated content platform. Numerous Full Circle developers have confirmed their departures. Among them is Anna Huerta, senior creative director at Maxis for The Sims, who said she was "impacted by today's restructuring" and was "incredibly sad" not to keep working with such talented people.
Those affected are not junior staff passing through. Many had been at their studios for years: one seasonal creative director had previously spent 17 years at BioWare, while a Sims artist appears to have worked at EA since 2019. The list also includes senior designers, a senior gameplay designer, a software engineer and a development director at Full Circle, plus technical artists and character artists at Ripple Effect.
There is currently no sign that Full Circle, Maxis or Ripple Effect will be shut down or their games cancelled, as happened to BioWare. The pressure behind the cuts is financial: EA took on billions of dollars of debt as part of its acquisition by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, and according to the sources, the company has chosen to find that money in its employees' livelihoods.
The timing stings. Only days earlier EA had paused Project Lotus, the mobile Sims game, to concentrate Maxis's resources on Project Evergreen, the next mainline entry for PC and consoles. That reallocation, presented as a strategic choice, did not spare the same studio from cuts.
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