Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA) continues to struggle with the fact that its legacy console-based games have lost ground to products that run on smartphones, many of which are free or priced at a few dollars. The company’s CEO resigned recently as weak earnings were announced. Wall St. does not expect a recovery, which leaves EA with few options. It demonstrated one of those options when it laid off a portion of its product staff.
“EA is sharpening its focus to provide games for new platforms and mobile. In some cases, this involves reducing team sizes as we evolve into a more efficient organization,” the company told Joystiq. “These are difficult decisions to let go of good people who have made important contributions to EA, and whenever possible we retrain or relocate employees to new roles. Streamlining our operations will help ensure EA is bringing the best next-generation games to players around the world.”
We continue to work on finding out the extent of today’s impact, but we believe we have a better grip on today’s layoffs at EA Mobile Montreal. Our understanding is that 60 to 70 permanent employees were let go, along with over 100 people working under EA’s contract system. These are mostly quality assurance testers. We’re told by one source, “If you walk through the office all you see is a bunch of already cleared out desks, and people cleaning out their desks.”
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