EA lays off 670 people and announces a new direction with fewer licensed games

EA is laying off 670 people and announcing it will stop making externally licensed games to focus on its own IPs, online games or EA Sports games.

It’s been a disastrous week for the video game industry. Sony PlayStation, after achieving very strong sales of the PS5 and games such as Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, announced 900 layoffs, studio closures or game cancellations.

Today Electronic artanother giant who announces dismissal of 670 peoplesimultaneously announcing a change in strategy or orientation to maximize investment and minimize losses.

In information shared by IGN, EA CEO Andrew Wilson

sent out an email to employees explaining the reason for the cuts, which affected 5% of employees.

EA will stop producing licensed games and will focus on EA Sports and its original IPs.

There was a time when EA was synonymous with games based on movies, TV series, cartoons… More recently, EA has been synonymous with Star Wars, Battlefront games, and more recently Star Wars Jedi or Squadrons.

This will end soon: Wilson confirms that the company will stop making games based on licensed products and will focus on EA Sports games, online games and its own IP projects (such as Battlefield, The Sims…).

EA is currently developing the third game in the trilogy, which will replace Star Wars Jedi Survivor as well as the Marvel games from Iron Man and Black Panther

. There’s no fear of them being cancelled, but don’t expect them to get sequels unless something changes.

“Given how and where we operate, we continue to optimize our real estate presence around the world to better support our business. We are also shutting down games and development of future licensed IP products that we do not believe will be successful in our changing industry.“

“This increased focus allows us to fuel creativity, accelerate innovation and double down on our greatest capabilities, including our IP, esports and massive online communities, to provide the entertainment gamers need today and tomorrow.

These layoffs, according to IGN sources, mainly affect the support teams and not so much the development teams. The closure will only impact games on mobile devices. F1 Mobile Racing and MLB Tap Sports

.

With these 670 layoffs, the number of jobs destroyed this year is about 8000 jobs. In addition to Sony and EA, Supermassive Games and Deck Nine also laid off 90 people and 20% of their staff, respectively.