Current and former employees of Electronic Arts are voicing growing frustration after the latest round of mass layoffs. Speaking to Chris Kerr of Vertical Slice, they describe a daily reality shaped by mismanagement and a focus on profit that they say comes before everything else. The headline quotes the sharpest line from the testimony: "I don't want to work at this place anymore."
The picture that emerges is of a company run by an executive class that, in the words quoted by Kerr, "cannot fail, only be failed." In this arrangement, the workers say, the consequences always fall on staff, never on leadership. Kerr summed up his reporting in a LinkedIn post, saying he had gathered the accounts of current and former employees to understand how the latest layoffs unfolded and what daily life at the publisher is like.
The context is a long series of restructurings. Last August EA was acquired for 55 billion dollars by a group led by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund PIF and the investor Jared Kushner, and at that time some employees, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisals, had already described a climate of cynicism and uncertainty, with worries about creative censorship. The new testimony sits on that same thread, but adds the direct account of those who were cut and those who stayed behind.
The latest cut follows the one that hit BioWare, the studio behind Dragon Age and Mass Effect, and that brought about 400 layoffs across the group, touching Maxis, Full Circle and Ripple Effect as well. On that occasion the layoffs surfaced mainly through LinkedIn posts from those affected, because the internal memo did not say which other studios would be hit. The accounts gathered by Kerr point to the same dynamic: word from above often arrives late or in partial form, and it is employees who reconstruct the picture.
The case is not isolated in the industry. In the same days Microsoft began offering voluntary exit incentives to around 60,000 employees to fund its artificial intelligence investments, and Satya Nadella defended the restructuring of Xbox as "fantastic to watch." These moves follow the same cost-containment logic that EA staff describe as driving decisions from the top.
EA has not, for now, responded in detail to the accusations collected in the piece, and the testimony remains that of the workers interviewed. What remains to be seen is whether internal pressure will change how the next cuts are handled, or whether the next wave of layoffs will unfold in the same way.
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