Key Takeaways
- EA laid off approximately 400 people across multiple studios last week — about 3% of its global workforce — as part of a post-acquisition restructuring
- Current and former EA staff have described a culture of secrecy and isolation around layoffs, with affected colleagues disappearing without warning or goodbye
- Workers say they are told they are being let go via Zoom calls with chat disabled and no ability to ask questions or say farewell to colleagues
- It can take weeks for EA to communicate how remaining teams should absorb the work of laid-off colleagues
- Staff describe “terrible” morale and leadership obsessing over generative AI as a cost-cutting solution, “much to the chagrin” of those on the ground
- EA is carrying roughly $18-20 billion in debt following its $55 billion Saudi-led private acquisition, and has pledged to cut $700 million in annual costs
- Industry trackers project 2026 could rival or approach 2024 as the worst year on record for game industry job losses, with forecasts reaching up to 14,666 cuts
- Xbox has also been cutting aggressively, with a target of removing 3,200 people from the division
Last week’s announcement that EA was cutting 400 jobs and shutting down BioWare after more than three decades was grim enough on its own. But the human reality behind those numbers is hitting differently now that current and former EA staff are speaking out — and what they’re describing paints a picture of a company where workers are treated as line items, morale has collapsed, and the executives running the show seem increasingly disconnected from the people making the games.
How EA Tells Workers They’re Fired
If there’s one detail from Vertical Slice’s report that captures the cold corporate machinery at work here, it’s how EA communicates layoffs to the people being let go. According to multiple sources, affected employees are invited to a Zoom call — with chat disabled and the other participants hidden. They are then told they are losing their jobs, with no opportunity to ask questions, and no chance to say goodbye to the colleagues they’ve worked with, sometimes for years.
“You’re getting laid off because you’re just numbers on a list,” one source told Vertical Slice. “There’s never an understanding of the actual project [you’re working on].”
The secrecy doesn’t end there. According to one former employee, her colleagues only discovered she had been laid off through LinkedIn — despite working directly with her day to day. EA frames this as a policy to “protect the privacy of anybody impacted,” but the workers living through it see something different. “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.”
The knock-on effect for the work itself is significant. When a colleague disappears with no announcement, the in-progress projects and responsibilities they carried don’t disappear with them. Those tasks fall to whoever remains — but sources reveal it can take weeks for EA leadership to even communicate what that should look like in practice. Teams are left guessing, treading water, waiting to be told what just happened and what’s expected of them next.
“A Cold Dead Place That’s Slowly Decaying”
The broader picture drawn by EA’s current and former staff is of a company that has been in internal decline for a while, with the Saudi-led $55 billion acquisition that completed in August 2026 accelerating the worst of it. The deal left EA saddled with approximately $18-20 billion in debt, carrying around $1.8 billion a year in interest payments, and the company has publicly committed to finding $700 million in annual cost savings. That math lands on people.
“Morale has been terrible,” one source told Vertical Slice. “The line we kept hearing is ‘do less, better’ but it just felt like we were doing the same amount with less people.” They also noted that upper management has been vocal about their enthusiasm for generative AI as a solution — something that landed poorly with the people actually doing the work. “Upper management was very excited about Claude and the possibilities of [generative] AI, much to the chagrin of my team.”
The frustration boils over in one particularly stark quote from the report. “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.”
Sources also described the shift in priorities at EA as stark and direct: profit first, people a distant second. The company’s current restructuring is focused heavily on its biggest commercial properties — EA Sports titles, Apex Legends, and big action-adventure franchise games — while the more ambitious, longer-running creative projects like the Mass Effect sequel in early development have simply been cut.
What EA Cut and What Survives
The October 21 restructuring saw BioWare closed entirely, with the Mass Effect sequel cancelled. The Sims project codenamed Project Lotus has been paused. Meanwhile, EA has said it will invest heavily in Apex Legends and is bringing Respawn and DICE together to collaborate on an unannounced project — widely understood to be a new Star Wars: Battlefront title. Marvel’s Iron Man and the next Star Wars Jedi game also remain active.
The shape of EA’s future is coming into focus: sports games every year, live-service titles that generate ongoing revenue, and a narrower slate of prestige single-player games. What doesn’t fit that model — like BioWare’s long-form, story-driven RPGs requiring years of expensive development — has been cleared out. As BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk observed in his first public comments on the closure, “BioWare makes these kinds of unusual games that take a long time and they’re complicated and so it’s easier just to pump out sports games every year, and that’s a better business model in some ways.”
The Wider Industry Crisis: 2026 Could Be Historic
EA’s layoffs are painful enough in isolation, but they’re landing at a moment when the broader games industry is going through one of the most severe periods of workforce reduction it has ever seen. Industry tracker Amir Satvat’s forecast — referenced in recent Bluesky posts — puts 2026’s total game industry layoffs potentially close to the record set in 2024.
Tracker data from the ASGC Games Industry Layoffs Tracker has revised its 2026 full-year projection up 78% from its original January estimate, now forecasting between 14,259 and 14,666 job losses — approaching 2024’s record of approximately 15,600 cuts. That revision has happened in large part because of the Xbox restructuring, which is targeting the elimination of 3,200 roles across the Xbox division as part of Microsoft’s broader reorganization — hitting studios including Bethesda, Obsidian, id Software, Double Fine, Ninja Theory, Compulsion, and Undead Labs.
Since 2022, industry trackers estimate the games sector has lost somewhere between 45,000 and 58,000 jobs total — a staggering cumulative toll that has occurred even as global gaming revenue has continued to grow, hitting records in 2025. The paradox at the heart of this moment is that the games industry is generating more money than it ever has, while cutting more jobs than almost any period in its history. The winners are consolidating around live-service blockbusters and annual sports franchises. The losers are the studios, teams, and individuals who built the more ambitious, expensive, slower-burning creative projects that defined gaming’s critical reputation.
For the hundreds of EA and BioWare employees currently navigating unemployment, the macro picture is cold comfort. They’re looking for work in an industry that laid off tens of thousands of people before them.
For more on what’s happening at EA and across the gaming industry, read our coverage of BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk’s first comments on the studio’s closure and the delay of The Duskbloods into 2027. Also worth reading: Silent Hill: Townfall’s Halloween update adding Hard Mode and the latest on the Modern Warfare 4 Itaewon footage controversy in South Korea.
