EA关闭BioWare并裁员400人

EA executives today informed employees of some “deliberate choices to align talent and investments where we see the greatest opportunities for players and long-term growth.”

Those choices:

A 3% workforce reduction, accounting for some 400 jobs, according to a source familiar with the move. (That follows 800 roles cut in 2023; 670 cut in 2024, and 400+ jobs cut in 2025)1
The closure of BioWare, the revered role-playing game studio founded in 1995 and sold to EA in 2007, which had about 50 people doing early work on a new Mass Effect. They said: “BioWare is a legendary studio that helped define the role-playing genre, and we do not take this decision lightly.” I understand that some BioWare workers had previously been reassigned to other projects, including EA’s Iron Man game.
The cancellation of that new Mass Effect. TBD the status of the potential Amazon Prime Video Mass Effect TV show, which they did not mention
The “pausing” of development of Project Lotus, also known as Project Rene: A former next-gen Sims project of sort that had been retooled as a mobile-focused Sims experience (A different Sims project, Evergreen, will be focused on)
The downsizing of the team working on its live-service skateboarding game Skate “to have a more focused, smaller team to deliver on a very clear roadmap for our community that we believe will build a healthier and more sustainable business.” (The series’ seasonal creative director was among the cuts.)
The assignment of teams at DICE and Respawn to work on a new project together. Reportedly Star Wars Battlefront 3.
The resurrection of EA’s long dormant Fight Night boxing franchise, which dovetails nicely with EA’s new owners’ maneuvers over the last decade to become the top power broker in pro boxing
The development of “a brand-new, social-first open-world experience for our American Football team that we call ‘Project Gridiron.’”
And a commitment to continue developing and eventually launch a previously announced games based on Iron Man and a previously announced third game in the Star Wars Jedi series

Two big clouds hang over EA’s announcements today.

The first is the industry-wide reckoning with soaring nine-figure development costs, which has justified the downsizing of many of gaming’s biggest companies, including Sony PlayStation, Microsoft’s Xbox division and Ubisoft. To wit, EA leaders today said they want to make fewer action-adventure games: “we will concentrate our efforts on fewer simultaneous, large-scale projects, ensuring that every game we build in this space is fully set up for success.”

The second, EA’s debt-financed $55 billion sale, which closed this past August, to a consortium of investors led by Saudi Arabia’s public wealth fund. That mega-deal, as is standard, did not spare EA’s workforce. Nor were they spared by that deal taking EA private and sparing it the need to please public investors every fiscal quarter.

Previous EA cuts somehow did not stop the company’s headcount from growing year-by-year due to extensive hiring; there’s no indication that EA will continue to hire in ways that offset the newest cuts