Electronic Arts to lay off 5% of workforce, reduce office spaces

NIB@lemmy.world to Games@lemmy.world – 116 points –
reuters.com

Videogame maker Electronic Arts (EA.O) , opens new tab said on Wednesday it would reduce 5% of its workforce, as the industry struggles to grow amid high interest rates.

The company expects to incur about $125 million to $165 million in charges as part of the restructuring plan that also includes a reduction in real estate.

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You know, work from home would help clear that office space, but we can't have that. Too much power to the employees, why would they.

A lot of those executives own real estate and need to keep those numbers up. I wonder how long before we pay people to sit in offices just so they can inflate their value.

Wait a minute...

It's not about office space. They built a new office which somehow doesn't have enough capacity for everyone but it's still mandatory two days a week. It's just micromanagement at this point.

The US isn’t in a recession, but all these big companies seem to think it’s high time we had another.

Been saying it since last year. The companies are so terrified of a recession that they're going to cause one. The funny thing is that this time the market is actually trending up again. This time they just want their bonuses.

What we all have to keep this laser centered in our minds when we talk about this is that for the ruling class, recessions are an essential part of the process of increasing their chokehold on society.

Capitalists want everything to periodically catastrophically collapse and go up in flames, without it the easily exploitable field of workers would grow into a mature forest with unions and other mechanisms that gradually grew in power to ensure the fruits of worker’s labor were distributed in a remotely fair way.

Make no mistake, they WANT a recession and honestly I think they are probably confused they haven’t been able to instigate the early arrival of one yet.

Maybe people are playing less games than a few years ago?

The tech industry is eating itself. I think NVIDIA is making out ok though, AI has created jobs for them for now.

They're playing less AAA games, yes. People are thinking much harder about the $60+ price tag as AAA studios repeatedly fail to live up to their promises. I feel like Nintendo is the only AAA company that doesn't have a losing record for the past ~5 years

There’s a few L’s but overall yeah, Nintendo has been doing fine.

According to EA, people want more large open worlds, multiplayer, and existing IPs so they want to do double down on that. This is from the company who released immortal of averum and wild hearts which barely ran at launch and then they wonder why people don't like any of their new IPs

And according to Ubisoft, people want always-on live-service AAAAAAA $99 deluxe edition games stuffed absolutely full of microtransactions, loot boxes, daily exclusive rewards, kermel level root kits DRM, Ubisoft connect exclusive, nightmare shitfests that you don't really own anyway.