We're getting close to the end of the fiscal year, which means that even more lay-offs are happening in the games industry. PlayStation announced it was planning to cut 900 jobs earlier this week, which lead to multiple games being cancelled. Now it's Electronic Arts' turn.
Andrew Wilson, EA's CEO, confirms the massive publisher is laying off approximately 5 per cent of its work force. That's around 670 people losing their jobs so that EA can "optimize our global real estate footprint to best support our business". The changes don't stop there either, as Wilson makes it sound we shouldn't expect many more Star Wars and Marvel games from them in the future, because EA is "sunsetting games and moving away from development of future licensed IP that we do not believe will be successful in our changing industry."
That last part is obviously interesting when we know Motive is working on an
Iron Man game, Cliffhanger is all hands on a Black Panther game and Respawn was developing three Star Wars games. I write was because the latter is no longer the case.
Laura Miele, the president of EA Entertainment and Technology, says that one of the games being cancelled as part of these lay-offs is the long-rumoured first-person Mandalorian game from Respawn Jonas reminded you about earlier this month. This probably means the developers of Titanfall and Apex Legends are left with working on the yet to be formally announced strategy game and the sequel to Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.