Following the successful sale of EA to Saudi Arabian Private Investment Fund, Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners and Silver Lake, the ever-reliable Jason Schreier has reported that they plan some major cost-cutting exercises.
Without getting too bogged down in financial details, the fact is that EA has massive debts, and its current income barely covers the interest payments on these. They need to save some money somewhere, and you can guess how that is going to happen.
“The publisher has told debt investors that it will cut $700 million in annual costs,” reports Jason on Bluesky, “including $170 million in ‘organizational efficiencies,’ per Bloomberg. In other words: mass layoffs”
We have another suggestion. EA CEO Andrew Wilson should forego his bonus this year, if they’re looking for “organizational efficiencies”. He’s led the company to have these debts and high interest, and not dropping $38 million into the CEO’s pocket as they did for the last fiscal year would be a great start to cutting those running costs, wouldn’t it?
The report follows layoffs this year at Microsoft, Double Fine, Bungie, Ubisoft, and Meta. EA have already had one round of redundancies earlier this year affecting the Battlefield and Skate teams.
While all this consolidation makes business sense, it’s not great for gamers as the companies are focusing on big brands and no longer taking any risks. Activision is essentially just Call of Duty now, Bethesda is one big Fallout machine, and others such as Ubisoft are also focusing on a couple of their big brands.
Source: BlueSky
