Game news This video game juggernaut fires no fewer than 200 people at a time! And the method has nothing to envy to Elon Musk…
Decidedly, Elon Musk isn’t the only one who has laid off several hundred employees on a whim… EA actually shut down an entire studio that was working on battle royale Apex Legends without notice.
EA cleans up, laid off almost 200 employees
Today, Nearly 200 Electronic Arts employees have received very bad news: they were fired with a snap of their fingers. This sad tale appears to be reminiscent of the recent misadventure of Esther Crawford, the former head of Twitter Blue, who, like many of her peers, found himself out of a job overnight due to a more than hasty decision by ‘Elon Musk.
In fact, as reported by the Kotaku site, Electronic Arts, after an impromptu meeting on Zoom, decided to fire all Baton Rouge studio employees. Located in Louisiana, this now-defunct studio provided the quality of life for several EA hits, starting with the battle royale Apex Legends.
This scandal apparently caused many employees to react, starting with three anonymous employees who reported the facts to Kotaku, but also by TopMarx420, who did not hesitate to make himself heard on Twitter.
EA just fired their entire studio in Baton Rouge, which is essentially all of Apex Legends’ QA staff.
— Ben (@TopMarx420) February 28, 2023
EA just fired their entire Baton Rouge studio, which are basically all QA staff for Apex Legends. They’re slowly hiring at other studios, but none of these people have experience with the title. My friend who is still there said he received an email today about an Aoom meeting and then immediately revoked his credentials. You pay them 60 days compensation. None of the managers seem to have been informed that all of their staff would be laid off. Who knows if they still work there. I imagine they have to make a decision whether to move somewhere extremely expensive or quit. Baton Rouge has been working on Apex since the beginning. (…) REST IN PEACE
Therefore, after the closure of the mobile version of Apex Legends, the console version of Battle Royale loses almost 200 testers who did everything possible to make the games enjoyable.
Expected changes for Apex Legends?
When Electronic Arts wasn’t directly talking about the layoffs, the studio still announced that it’s changed its strategy to maintain Apex Legends’ quality of life.
As part of our ongoing global strategy, we are expanding the distribution of our Apex Legends test team and ending test execution, which was centered in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (…) Our global team, which includes remote testers in the United States, allows us to increase the number of hours per week devoted to testing and optimizing games and reflects our commitment to our growing understand and better serve community around the world. Electronic Arts
In other words, There’s little chance players will feel this new decision from Electronic Arts while playing Apex Legends. since several people are already doing the work formerly done by Baton Rouge. Despite everything, we can only be sad for these 200 employees who are left with nothing overnight. We now hope that the former Baton Rouge team has better surprises in store in the coming days.
