At least as far as my memory of modern gaming goes, Electronic Arts has gone through crises as a publisher, with rumors of messy mandates and pushes marring many a game project, not to mention the many closures and cancellations it has left in its wake.
That said, in the current, extremely unpleasant state of the gaming industry, where layoffs are running rampant and questionable tech like genAI is being pushed with worrying fervor, it seems EA’s troubles have only been magnified, and it’s starting to seriously wear on the company’s ground-level workers.
Gaming outlet Vertical Slice spoke with several current and former EA employees under the condition of anonymity about how things are looking at the company right now, particularly in the wake of the devastating closure of BioWare last week. The picture these workers paint is not pretty, with workers being laid off rapidly and seemingly at random, while an out-of-touch C-suite repeatedly pushes outdated game design concepts alongside supposed labor-saving measures like genAI that, in reality, only make the work more difficult.
All of this has been in pursuit of making any money possible, alongside pinching pennies en masse, all to recoup...
