Last week, EA announced it’s laying off 400 workers across multiple studios, cancelling projects and refocusing on its biggest money-makers. As part of that, EA closed down the iconic BioWare studio, letting go of most of its remaining staff of around 50 people.
The mood inside EA is, unsurprisingly, low. Speaking to Vertical Slice, a number of current and former staff revealed a culture of secrecy surrounding layoffs, and a lack of clarity on who, exactly, is affected and how their teams are meant to move forward without them.
One former employee said her colleagues only discovered she’d been laid off through LinkedIn, despite working directly with her. According to the report, that’s part of EA’s policy to “protect the privacy of anybody impacted”, but workers see it differently.
“My suspicion is that it is done to isolate the people laid off,” one source said. “Depending on how large a layoff it is, it can take us a week or two or more to get our bearings back under us and figure out what we’re doing.”
This also affects the work itself, since in-progress projects become the responsibility of the fewer remaining members of the team. But a source revealed that it can take weeks for EA to communicate those specifics to staff and to chart a path forward.
EA’s approach to telling affected employees they’re being let go is one that should sound familiar to anyone who knows the modern corporate world. According to multiple sources, staff are invited to a Zoom call with chat disabled and the other participants hidden. They’re then told they’re being laid off, without being given the chance to ask any questions or say goodbye to their colleagues.
“You’re getting laid off because you’re just numbers on a list,” one source said. ” There’s never an understanding of the actual project [you’re working on].”
Sources also said EA is prioritising profits over the wellbeing of its people, now more than ever. As a result of EA’s $55bn acquisition by a consortium of investors – chiefly Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund – EA is saddled with $20bn of debt it has to find ways to recoup.
“Morale has been terrible,” another source said. “The line we kept hearing is ‘do less, better’ but it just felt like we were doing the same amount with less people. Upper management was very excited about Claude and the possibilities of [generative] AI, much to the chagrin of my team.”
For the largest game publisher in the western world, all of this is unfortunate to see. But for many within EA, the decline has been seeping in for a while.
“That the recent email about the organisation changes [sounded like] it was written by a robot best sums up EA,” one source said. “A cold dead place that’s slowly decaying as leadership pilfers every last cent, leaving the rest of us to worry about how we feed our families.”
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the games industry, the Xbox division is suffering through multiple waves of lay-offs, all with the cumulative aim of removing 3,200 people from their roles. Raj Patel, who’s been tracking games industry layoffs, recently revealed on Bluesky that 2026 is on track to be the worst year on record in terms of the number of people laid off.
