EA developers were already having a bad time before the publisher was acquired by a trio of investors led by Saudi Arabia in a $55 billion buyout. Now the deal is done, EA has gone private, and its developers are feeling more pressure than before.
Anonymous EA workers describe their tense work environment in a report from Game Developer. While EA has been attempting to cure staff concerns about the Saudi Arabia buyout for a year now, sharing a half-hearted guarantee in 2025 that "there will be no immediate changes to your job," one worker says the reality is, "Everybody just assumes they are under the threat of layoffs at all times."
"Given how things have been across the industry at large," they continue, "but also internally at EA. There is also some amount of cynicism in that we expect they won't be enacted as mass layoffs anymore but rather as waves of small layoffs in order to bypass [Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification] notices" – layoff warnings required by the US government in the event of a large workforce reduction. GamesRadar+ has reached out to EA for comment about these staff concerns and the likelihood of layoffs.
Of course, EA never needed something as weighty as a fat buyout to use as an excuse for layoffs. This spring, the publisher laid off workers across four different studios that helped create Battlefield 6, which EA called "the biggest launch in franchise history." After the Battlefield 6 job cuts, EA's newest financial report showed that CEO Andrew Wilson made 305x more than the average EA employee last year, and he could qualify for $125 million in severance depending on how things go with EA's new owners.
The average game developer doesn't get a money parachute like Wilson. As part of its buyout agreement, EA is meant to pay back $18 billion of the total debt it took on now that its deal has closed with Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake investors, and Jared Kushner's Affinity firm.
EA has reportedly committed to slicing off $700 million in yearly costs to help finance this debt, with $170 million of that downsizing meant to come from changes in "organizational efficiencies." Workers don't seem to think the publisher is referring to Andrew Wilson's $38,649,984 salary when it says "organizational efficiencies."
"It's hard to see how teams or games that underperform wouldn't be dissolved or sold off," another employee tells Game Developer. "The history of leveraged buyouts shows that this is the playbook, no matter what our executives insist will be different."
They continue, "I have no internal secret information – we don't need any to see how this thing plays out – but the only unknown (and fear) is how soon and how deep things need to get cut back to pay off this debt. Any year that EA's cash flow goes down, rather than up, will be bad for employees." It all feels bad, really.
