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Despite the success of Battlefield 6, DICE, Criterion, Motive, and Ripple Effect are being affected.
"Hello everyone and welcome back to another GRTV News. We're getting into a bit of a trend with these kinds of GRTV News but we need to talk about it all the same. More layoffs, this time affecting the Battlefield Studios family over at EA. It's kind of an unusual story this one because Battlefield 6 was a rather impressive launch for EA, the most successful Battlefield to debut ever with tons of players hopping in. You could argue that the player retention hasn't been as good as many would hope but it had a really, really strong launch that you would have assumed would have paid back a lot of the production costs of the game. And yet, here we are talking about layoffs affecting the entire Battlefield Studios family. Now we don't know whether, well there's no mention should we say, whether these layoffs will affect EA in a wider sense. As it's only mentioned this is hitting Criterion, Motive, Ripple Effect and DICE, so the four pillars let's say of the Battlefield Studios family. But anyway, let's dive in and take a look. Battlefield Studios hit by layoffs despite Battlefield 6's huge success, the game contributed to record-breaking net bookings to the latest fiscal report but that wasn't enough to keep the operation's size intact."
"So yes, it was merely a month ago when we reported that Battlefield 6, EA Sports, FC26 and Apex Legends credited by EA for record net bookings according to the publisher's latest financial report. But neither that nor the shooter becoming the best-selling game of 2025 in its homeland will prevent EA from laying off an undisclosed number of employees across all Battlefield Studios. As IGN reports, the move is impacting teams such as DICE, Criterion, Ripple Effect and Motive. Employees have been told that downsizing is a response to a realignment of development resources while a core team remains focused on Battlefield 6's post-launch online services. This is the full explanation by EA obtained by the source. We've made a select changes within our Battlefield organisation to better align our teams around what matters most to our community. Battlefield remains one of our biggest priorities and we continue to invest in the franchise guided by player feedback and insights from Battlefield Labs. The game was recently criticised for season delays and disbanded lobbies and both its popularity and online activity seem to have taken a dip as of late. However, the game was embraced by millions in the series biggest launch ever just a few months ago so it's the it's in the interest of the publisher and the community for the current game to catch up and for new ambitious entries to follow in the near future. So in my eyes this is probably a little bit of a tease of what's to come because of the fact that EA was recently bought for 50 whatever billion dollars by mainly the Saudi Arabian public investment fund but also a consortium of different investors. The reason why I say that is because to make that acquisition a huge amount of debt was taken on. It's basically levying the value of EA against the debt so they could steadily pay back the debt over time. The problem is when you do that you need to make a lot of money to pay the debt back and one of the best ways to make money is obviously to cut costs. It wouldn't surprise me if this is somewhat to do with that a little bit and that maybe this is just a a tease of what's to come for EA in the future to help pay back this astronomical debt because it is a huge amount I think it's something like 20 or 30 billion or something like that it's like an extreme amount of money that they need to ultimately pay back before this before the company goes back to it sort of its value before the acquisition happened. Now might be something to do might be something entirely different I mean I've long been vocal about video games needing to be made at a more cost-efficient and perhaps even cheaper manner. I think they're too expensive especially triple-a games like Battlefield 6. I mean you have to remember that this is a game that's not been made by one studio it's been made by four development teams for the entire studio sorry coming together and making one title. For something to be successful with that kind of support it needs to be Call of Duty successful. I know even Call of Duty's not quite the same situation as Battlefield because the Call of Duty families they typically take different entries or different entire games for themselves you know for example with the next Call of Duty we're expecting it to be from Infinity War the last one was I think Treyarch. Tech generally speaking Raven handles Warzone and Sledgehammer does well used to do an entire used to do this sort of World War games but they've been a bit blakey ever since but the point is is that you have you have different developers that tackle different games whereas with with Battlefield we're looking at four developers that made one game they've all tackled different parts of the game be that you know the single-player the multiplayer the battle royale or you know Gordon or whatever you call it all these different elements but the point is it's it's it's one developer or one game that four developers are working on so it's a bit of an interesting one this maybe it's not it doesn't bode the best for the future of Battlefield Studios maybe it's to do with this this massive acquisition that happened recently it's difficult to say but I think that we're gonna hear more about this in the future so stay tuned for that otherwise if that's all the time that I have so thank you for joining me in today's GRTV news I'll see you on the next one"
