Mass layoffs have reportedly happened at Electronic Arts. The company fired up to 100 customer support staff, many of whom worked on FIFA 22.
Kotaku, which obtained internal EA emails, reported the news on May 18.
- The layoffs affected employees in Austin. However, there will also be “proposing redundancy” for similar positions in the company’s office in Galway, which provided support for European players.
- EA made this decision “in order to reduce complexity and increase our efficiency, flexibility and scalability,” according to the company’s VP of customer experience Joel Knutson.
- From now on, EA plans to outsource this work, which mainly consists of email, chat, and phone support for FIFA players.
- As one source told Kotaku, the layoffs happened after customer service staff repeatedly complained about annual salary increases being too low (as little as $0.10 hourly rise).
- EA denied that these layoffs were connected to its split from FIFA, which resulted in renaming the popular series of sports games to EA Sports FC.
- The company’s spokesperson noted that “we are considering changing a number of roles within the team, closing some roles and also creating new ones” as part of the process of improving its customer support service.
- EA said that it has opened 10 new roles for customer support on mobile, which laid-off employees can apply for.