Electronic Arts To Lay-Off More Than 500 Employees
EA has been entrusted with the worst company in America title, and it's on its way to begin rapidly downsizing.
Recently, it has been confirmed by multiple sources from within Electronic Arts that more than 500-1000 people are planned to be let go. Even more depressing is that it could start as early as this week. Originally scheduled for April 9th, the company pushed back the layoffs to this week. Does this come as such of a surprise, with how much the company is stretching themselves out lately? Being named the worst company in America and purchasing PopCap for nearly $1.3 billion is just a few of the major impacts the publisher has had this year. On top of this, EA has officially dropped from a $61 stock price, to the lowly $16. Millions of gamers around the world have shown just what can happen to a company, when they feel greed has overtaken the good of the consumer. Battlefield 3 sales put the total around 13MM units. Many would deem this a success. However, EA sought after more money from the title by pursuing an additional marketing campaign post-launch. This ended up in an estimated $30MM of marketing funding, post-launch. While it's understandable to follow up on a successful product, $30MM seems to be a significantly large amount to invest in an already widely purchased product. This tactic even catapulted itself into their MMO title Star Wars: The Old Republic, which is now estimated to be around 3MM units sold. While subscription are continuing to decline, this spells disaster for EA. In order for games that run on subscriptions to be truly successful, they need to have a large amount of subscriptions for a fairly long period of time after launch in order to truly payoff. EA is definitely in for trouble ahead. With the newly announced lay-offs set to happen seemingly at any minute, it looks like trouble may follow them for a long time to come. Source: Derek Andersen of Startup Grind