Electronic Arts has disbanded its QA team in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with around 300 people losing their jobs as a result. The team was primarily working on Apex Legends.
Kotaku reports that the employees were invited to an unscheduled and mandatory Zoom call with their contracting agency at eight AM yesterday, where they were given the news. All affected employees will be given 60 days severance pay, although sources state that this won’t cover the length of many contracts. Furthermore, employees are able to collect their personal belongings from the office only under the supervision of security.
In a statement to Kotaku, a spokesperson for the company stated that “Testing games is an integral part of delivering the best experiences for our players.”
“As part of our ongoing global strategy, we are expanding the distribution of our Apex Legends testing team and ending testing execution that’s been concentrated in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, impacting services provided by our third-party provider. Our global team, inclusive of remote playtesters across the U.S., enables us to increase the hours per week we’re able to test and optimise the game and reflects a commitment to understand and better serve our growing community around the world.”
Not all legends have happy endings
EA has seemingly been pulling back when it comes to Apex Legends in recent months. The company announced it was cancelling development of Apex Legends Mobile last month, despite the game’s enviable success worldwide, including cracking Japan’s challenging mobile market and taking home the Best Overall Game trophy at 2022’s Google Play Awards. At present, it's unclear if the team at Baton Rouge worked on Apex Legends Mobile.
There has been a notable trend of layoffs over the past several months, with the likes of ByteDance, Garena, and Playtika letting go of hundreds of workers in their attempts to maintain profitability in the challenging macroeconomic environment.
We listed Electronic Arts as one of the top 50 mobile game makers of 2022.
