And another 5% of the staff will have to look for new jobs, but these are minor things. The industry, EA believes, is changing.
The video game industry has been in a lot of trouble in recent years. There are an insane number of projects, development teams are inflated, budgets are inflated even more, and there are practically no more consumers of this content in the world (on the contrary: by leaving certain markets for political reasons, with their tails between their legs, game publishers are only losing their solvent audience), since the amount of free People usually have very limited time. All this is forcing the gaming industry to adapt. And like any adaptation, this one will not be painless.
Over the past couple of years, we have seen a huge number of cuts, restructurings, changes in strategy and other things, and now it’s Electronic Arts’ (EA) turn. As stated by the head of the company, Andrew Wilson, EA will carry out “optimization” and will keep up with the times, which pose new challenges to the publisher. Behind these cliched phrases lies the following: a reduction of 5% of employees, a focus on games based on their own franchises, and a refusal to release projects under licenses.
Formally, this will have little effect – well, Electronic Arts will not publish Star Wars games – but it should be noted that this is in many ways a turning point for the corporation. In particular, it is reported that the Star Wars shooter, for which Respawn Entertainment was responsible, has already gone under the knife. Those licensed projects that were in active production at the time of today's announcement, like the Star Wars Jedi threequel about the adventures of Cal Kestis, will continue to be developed: their production has gone too far to be cancelled.
The production of Dragon Age Dreadwolf, as well as the next Mass Effect and the new Battlefield, will not be affected by all of the above processes, so you can exhale here.