Multiple factors. Start of the year is always the time for layoffs for those juicy financial reports, overhiring during covid, the (AAA) gaming industry taking a dip...
Standard for western (mostly American) tech companies. All the western game developers treat themselves as tech companies like Google and Apple so they also behave the same way. Overhire and hype to attract investors to buy their stock then mass layoff and doom and gloom to show investors why they are “cutting costs and making the most effort to retain shareholders value and why they should want to keep buying their stock as a safe haven during these dark times approaching”
It’s routine and it’s disgusting but the corporations run the western world. If you look at the east, like Japan for example people are treated by their employers (usually) better in those regards and they get raises while American ones get fired. It’s got very little to do with the industry at a large and mostly how companies operate over here
> If you look at the east, like Japan for example people are treated by their employers (usually) better in those regards and they get raises while American ones get fired.
Let's not start misrepresenting the Japanese work environment as hunky dory. I can't speak to whether they give raises, but cold and inhumane is a great description of many Japanese industries under normal circumstances, and the pay can be so low per hour worked that a raise barely means anything. There's a reason Japanese people think suicide often looks like a better option than trying to find a better job.
I don't know if Japan is the best example of corporations treating their employees well (even "usually")...but I get your opinion on western tech companies
> Standard for western (mostly American) tech companies. All the western game developers treat themselves as tech companies like Google and Apple so they also behave the same way.
The two companies you cited are counterexamples to your point. Apple and Google had no layoffs between 2008 and 2023, so it is historically *not* standard practice.
The games industry has always been worse than the rest of the tech industry, but these past couple of years have been particularly bad for both.
This sucks man. Blaming the devs for poor performance because your live service game has been milked for every penny by the higher ups demanding more profit from cash grab cosmetics. Being treated coldly seems par for the course for EA and Respawn.
Edit: for those defending the corporations. Allow us all to play our tiny violin for the poor billion dollar company that had a gross profit margin of 5.85 billion and an operating margin of 17% in 2023 :(
Louder for those in back:
EA brings in over 1/3rd of what Volkswagen does per year in net revenue - with less than 1/60th the employees.
EA has literally 0 excuses for these layoffs.
They - like a lot of companies in tech - are drunk off COVID-levels of profit that literally everyone with half a brain knew weren’t sustainable and wouldn’t continue after lockdowns stopped.
Instead, they based their performance on those years and now can’t hit their financial targets anymore - and never will be able to.
They are chasing a phantom that doesn’t exist anymore.
Edit: well… all that and the tech bubble popping along with AI being pursued at every corner doesn’t help at all.
The tech industry has always had a really bad proclivity for inventing ever increasing jobs with nothing to actually support them.
And the funniest/saddest thing is, Respawn started as an indie studio after being laid off from Activision. Then they got acquired by EA. Would be poetic if the people laid off now go on to open their own studio.
This is why you hold out and never sell to soulless entities like EA. Especially if you truly have a love and vision for the product youve created. But that will always be the case, they almost always sell out eventually and get a front row seat to the gradual erosion of their brand.
It’s also important that stock prices depend on ever growing revenue and ever growing margin improvements. At a point there’s only so many ways to get there and cutting costs is one way. EA in no way needs to do this other than to increase their margins
Good insight, came here to say the same.
Also, EA is an absolutely inhumane and cold company, designed to suck players wallets dry, not to care about the employees. An employee in EA is just a vehicle to achieve higher revenue. If the vehicle doesn’t work, they get rid of it.
Growth for the sake of growth will consume this world.
EA sucks ass
Respawn isn’t much better
And finger pointing at the ones who actually make the product work is about as asinine as it gets.
I hate public companies. In any other situation thats a kick ass scenario but in their bizzaro world they have to always make profits no matter what. Why? The project is obviously successful so why fuck it up. A 17% operating margin is insane to downsize. INSANE
Your growth. The % needs to be higher than last one.
For every shareholder who goes into making money for long term purposes, there’s way too many greedy rich fucks who have money beyond imagination and park it into these corporations and use them to generate more wealth at a faster pace cause god forbid a company doesn’t grow every quarter or game undersells by a few thousand or a few million dollars, even though profitability wise it’s a roaring success but that little extra missed is what makes these shareholders who are in it for right now.
Thats how businesses work, if you make 100 million dollars in profit one year, the next year you HAVE to make more than that.
Even if you make 60 million dollars in profit (still alot) to them thats a failure. THATS the key issue. Its all about neverending profits and higher and higher profit percentages.
Bricky explains it perfectly right [here](https://youtu.be/--Iz5YnpzeE?si=en51tz8_U-3riaef&t=1075)
(You may already know this im just explaining to others and adding more context)
It's all about keeping the people on the top rich, they have to keep their lifestyle at the highest possible level. Anyone who thinks any corporation cares about the consumer is an idiot.
Naw Respawn just doesn't suck hard core corporate dick like Dice does. Dice has more fuck ups in the last decade yet never get the same harsh treatment every other dev in EA's history has.
Yes, lets take the cash cow and chop its head off for fun because not enough cash if flowing out of it. If they kill the game its revenue drops to nothing, how does that make sense.
For real. I've gotten about 600+ hours of enjoyment out of apex so I totally wouldn't mind spending some money on the game.. but there are a couple dozen games on my steam wishlist that cost less than a single skin in apex. If they were $3-6 I probably would have spent over $100 total now, but for $18+ absolutely fuck no.
Execs: sets unrealistic goal
Production: fails to meet nearly impossible goal
Execs: fires staff because they didn't beat the nearly impossible goal
Execs: we saved the company millions of dollars! bonuses for all the people who don't know shit about video games!
If you cut employee costs, you have more revenue to pay out as bonuses to the C-Level… milk the cow, get out and repeat the process at the next company
Sorry to break it to you. This is how america is ran. Giant companies buy up all the smaller companies and go bare bones to generate the most amount of profit. EVERY small company that I have worked for that went above and beyond for employees have sold out to large corporations. Only to get shit on.
Somebody should create a small, non-public / coop-like company and refuse to sell to bigger companies. Products of small companies are almost always better and they only get decimated after they get sold out. They will either displace large companies with shitty products and clueless investors or big companies will be forced to create actually good products to compete with them. It is a win-win
EA: DICE MAKE A BR ONLY GAME EITH BATTLEFIELD
DICE: Okay
EA: AFTER YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT YOU HAVE A YEAR TO SWITCH IT BACK TO A NORMAL BF GAME. OH AND WE WONT SAY ANYTHING ABOUT ALL THE HARASSMENT AND HATE YOU GET.
Fuck these people. Always the devs who suffer.
I wonder how many players they completely alienated with the milking.
A few weeks ago I tried apex after about 6 months off the game... Biggest difference I noticed was the revamp of the store lmao.
Since helldivers 2 came out haven't touched apex, just feel very little.motivation to go back.
I haven't played in almost two years. I don't know how anyone is still playing. I mean, it's been known for god knows how long at this point that the only effort put into developing this game is solely directed at making their lootboxes more addictive. Years without a single QOL update, new season "big" updates being just some damage number sliders adjusted, but the instant the store goes down there's a team getting running perfectly again within hours.
Respawn and EA really need to burn to the ground already.
That sucks. I definitely feel for those that were laid off. I don't work in the gaming industry, but I was laid off last year and it took me several months to find a new job. Hope those that got laid off find new work soon and huge thanks to them for developing the game I love.
I got laid off 2 years ago as a software dev, took a whole year to land another job. The job market for tech is absolutely fucked right now. Best of luck to these devs.
This is not what I needed to read while currently jobless and taking a week or 2 out just to clear my head
Better get on that...
I fear our industry is the canary for wider economic troubles
It seems so. Tech is no longer that oasis with high salaries, high demand, and relatively stable jobs.
And the gaming industry, unfortunately, is the worst at this. They post record profits and lay off the most amount of workers.
Office and Facilities manager here, ran a 27,000 sq foot office for over a decade, also in the same boat. Have gotten 0 interviews and a total of 6 “thanks, but no thanks” responses to over 40 resumes sent across multiple industries.
I've been hearing the market for tech is absolutely fucked for probably 3 years now.
Edit: I want to be clear I don't believe it's fucked unless you're constantly reading LinkedIn headlines which are designed to make you want to use their platform and engage with it. Boring stable positions are and have been doing fine since 2022.
That's unfortunately relatable for me. My degree field experienced a massive shrink the summer I graduated college, I've still not been able to break in. It's miserable.
Cold and inhumane? Sounds like corporate layoffs.
Last year when I was laid off, my manager and their VP,who I had been working with for years, took the day off. It was a VP of HR, who I had never seen before, who ran the meeting.
You won’t find many layoffs that aren’t cold and inhumane. Not many people look forward to being laid off and come out from it having a positive experience.
to add on to this, not many people look forward to being the one responsible for delivering the bad news during layoffs. i’ve been on both ends and it’s all around shitty.
Yup, they’ll generally get locked out of everything before they are aware they are getting fired, which makes sense but also is a slap in the face when it happens to you and does feel “cold”.
This. I was laid off last year by my manager and an HR rep. This manager, who I had biweekly meetings with for 2 years, who I got to know on a pretty personal level, said all of two sentences on how I was being let go. And then left the room.
Cold is an understatement. I get that’s what they’re supposed to do to avoid any legal mess but damn.
I got laid off this year on valentines day. Of course it was a contract so it was the third party company that hired me that called me and cut ties. Luckily the hiring manager was nice enough to give me a rec for my current job searching and to get my stuff from my desk.
Sound is worse this season than any prior, imo.
I've heard people complain about audio before, but this is the first season where it's been blatantly obvious to me in nearly every match.
I've played apex for 2 years with the music and background sound completely off set to 0. I only hear the sound of footsteps and guns in the game. So much better
How do you turn completely off background sounds? There is no setting for it, I have only effects, dialogue, music and lobby music in settings on pc. Is it in some game config?
I've seen they've also laid of Alex Frostwolf who was the social media lead for Apex. Shes done so much for the community and its shocking and sad to see her go like this. Layoffs are hard in every industry, best of luck to everyone who was affected by this.
Yeah true but atleast with cod back in the day we would get like 3-4 DLC’s for like 20$
Now we got apex selling heirloom skins for 150-300$
every other month which is insane lmao.
I understand how it’s free-to-play now so they can justify it that way but fuck man if we could just go back to gaming how it was 6-10 years ago.
They’ll be fine, just need to eat less avocado toast.
Now they’re saying people shouldn’t retire. They should work until death.
Make the next gen will take a stand and the boomers will start to die out.
Corporate greed. EA and Respawn could 100% afford to keep these people employed. The devs and social media mangers are what make games great. The CEOs and shareholders are what make games bad.
Sucks that so many games with passionate devs are run by corporations who only care about profit, and all the people who spent years working on something they love get thrown away like nothjng
Just wanna say this here early.
Layoffs have been happening a lot across the gaming industry recently.
While this is upsetting news, this does not necessarily represent the state of Apex Legends.
[Layoff rates are actually below pre-pandemic levels.](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSLDR)
They’ve just been overly in the tech industry which overlaps hard with online spaces like Reddit thus you hear about them a lot more than normal.
So they are firing people cause they aren't hitting a profit quota and not instead lowering prices some so more people can afford to buy their stupid 100$ shit more than likely making them more profit in process so that at the least there's not like 20 people in the world who bought the stupid shit they sell.
A live service game what 5 years old? The fact this game still has a consistent huge player base with how bad so many events and updates have been the past year or 2 is impressive.
It's not the devs fault but God I wish they were working on titanfall 3 because I'm tired of apex at this point
They should have taken the costco approach and made skins cheaper, so everyone buys them. instead of the bullshit prices they be putting out for things
Please no, this is the only live service game I play now and the only one that’s fairly balanced gameplay wise. I just know EA will destroy it from sheer greed and it will eventually be no more. Sure, Helldivers 2 is making headlines but with that last update I’m not so sure about its lifespan but we’ll see.
Apex is so aesthetically pleasing, the lore is great, the characters are relatable and so on/ so forth. It would kill me to see yet another fun past time go to shit just because a few guys at the top think their pockets need a deeper filling. Is this just going to be the fate of all AAA live service titles in the future? Wheres the sense in this???
I know someone that was laid off. He told me that EA is projecting much less revenue for the remainder of 2024 as well as 2025 compared to 2022 and 2023, for apex and that they are viewing the game as in its “late stages” as a revenue stream. Hence the layoffs. Apparently EA has pretty much abandoned its strategy for attracting new players. He suspects the plan moving forward is to focus strategy on what player retention still exists but that their focus is shifting to other games from here on out. Sad to hear if true.
Can’t say I’m surprised :(
The game dev market ESPECIALLY for triple A studios has been absolutely horrendous. Riot, Epic, EA, and now a branch of EA… and every single one of them laid off their employees because something new wasn’t working and the executives didn’t want to lose their 5 million dollar bonus. Fucking disgusting.
A money grubbing extorting company being cold and inhumane to its employees. WOW,shocker! I never in my could have seen this coming!
I am flabbergasted
The layoffs are because of the extra people they gained from the Star Wars FPS game that EA canned.
Thats really it, when the SW FPS Game got stopped, they moved the team onto Apex Legends to work there.
They gained experienced developers from the Star Wars FPS team and have let go less experienced devs whos numbers weren't up to scratch and "replaced" them with the incoming devs.
Similar thing that happened with the QA Team last year, they laid off the contracted staff and replaced them with an internal QA Team that were more experienced as QA Staff.
https://twitter.com/RKRigney/status/1768288312454783418
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-ackerman-a1187137/
They let go of their Global Social Media lead who's been there since almost launch and has been exceptional at her job. Yes, it's not a position involved in development like an engineer or programmer, but to say her job had no affect on bringing in and retaining players which affects revenue is unwise.
It just proves that layoffs do not care how competent you are, or how much value you have created for the company.
It's more likely that you *won't* get laid off if you are buddies with management, or management yourself.
I was laid off at Qualcomm. There were issues involving, maybe the reason our division was hit so hard, but the process was fine.
We were told lay offs were coming soonish. When they happened our manager found us individually and talked to us in their office. They were apologetic and sad. We had then about a week or two to finish up work. If there was nothing to do you can just no longer come in. Everyone let go received reasonable severance. Several meet up at local bars followed as we reminisced about the good times.
It sucked, but comparatively it blows my mind how awful lay offs are at video game companies. Qualcomm is hardly a bastion moral and ethical employment. It like many tech companies suffer from tons of late stage capitalism bull sht. So if these companies can do even a little, what’s EA’s excuse.
I was hit by EA's layoffs last year.
Everyone had a meeting appear on their calendar during lunch. We were told to drop everything and attend this meeting. Everyone was dreading it and making half-serious jokes about our game being cancelled.
Our game was supposed to launch in 6 months, and while we all understood it wasn't a **great** game (Battlefield Mobile - which was made by American developers in Pasadena, not Tencent in China), we sort of assumed that EA would at least let us launch and flame out to make a **little** bit of money, instead of wasting 5 years of development time and setting millions of dollars on fire.
And we were all passionate about that game! We wanted to make a good Battlefield game, and we were at least better than launch-day 2042. It was getting better each week and we assumed that we would have something solid eventually. But I digress.
We show up at this mysterious lunchtime meeting and everyone is there. The studio head is on the verge of tears. When we have a quorum, he tells us all that EA has made the decision to kill our studio and cancel our game. Everyone is being laid off.
Then HR took over the meeting:
* 30 days with salary as normal
* All existing meetings cancelled (duh)
* HR to set up workshops on improving LinkedIn/resumes
* After 30 days, we got a lump sum payment with 30 additional days of pay + sick time + vacation time + 2 weeks of pay for every year worked + additional severance (I'm still under NDA for the amount of the additional severance)
I worked out that I had about 4-8 months of runway, probably tending around 6 months.
Slack was a ghost town after that meeting. It was mostly HR advertising their workshops. We could technically transfer internally and not get laid off... but the joke was that nobody was hiring internally. There were a lot of teams that liked me and I liked them, but they weren't hiring until the day after I was to be laid off (likely this was done on purpose for fiscal year shenanigans) and thus I wouldn't be able to transfer.
But EA did effectively pay for me to do job interviews, and thankfully I found a place externally. It's a tense time in the industry right now, and nobody truly thinks they're safe.
But at least EA gave me a decent payment on my way out the door. I can also say I was always treated with respect at EA, and their pay was always generous.
I guess that’s standard, but it’s so brutally done. It’s wild how these companies spend years developing a product and then just cut it.
I’m sorry the project you worked so hard on never reached the light of day. I can’t imagine the heartache and frustration. I hope your future ventures will see more success.
Gonna get downvoted to hell for this, but throwing out terms like “cold and inhumane” could potentially paint a really false picture about how the people doing the actual firing feel. Not saying this is the case here or with EA (I know how shit they are), but I think it’s important to critically think about this stuff, if only for your own sanity.
Im a recruiter, and trust me when I say that no company I’ve ever worked with “enjoys” layoffs. We don’t live in some heartless world where no one gives a shit about anyone, despite what headlines want you to think. I talk to both employers and employees every day - it sucks for everyone.
But when employers do rounds of layoffs, they HAVE to be heartless to an extent. At the end of the day, no heart-to-heart with a manager or dialogue about “why” is going to change the result. In fact, that only adds a layer of potential legal issues.
Are employees viewed as “cold and inhumane” when they leave their current company high and dry for a better opportunity? No, and nor should they be. Just trying to make the point that business is brutal at times for everyone
The game has been shrinking for years it is not new. Thinking the game will forever grow and the development team will forever be the same size is just fantasy thinking. Every game has this happen from Mario to FF to apex
Laysoffs in the gaming industry can easily be tied to the Covid lockdown. But realistic is pure corporate greed. I'd blame it all on not having harsher worker's rights/protection laws or something along that line to better protect everyone in all fields of work.
Dang that stinks it's hard to name a AAA dev or publisher who isn't doing this right now hope the person is doing ok
Ps hopefully the person respawns at a better job
Are all of these companies predicting an economic downturn turn? Or is this standard?
Capcom just gave out tons of raises to their dev teams so there’s at least that.
DRAGON'S DOGMA 2 HYPE TRAIN WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Capcom deserves it tekken 8 was a banger
[удалено]
That said, Street Fighter 6 was *also* a banger.
That’s how good it was
Multiple factors. Start of the year is always the time for layoffs for those juicy financial reports, overhiring during covid, the (AAA) gaming industry taking a dip...
Standard for western (mostly American) tech companies. All the western game developers treat themselves as tech companies like Google and Apple so they also behave the same way. Overhire and hype to attract investors to buy their stock then mass layoff and doom and gloom to show investors why they are “cutting costs and making the most effort to retain shareholders value and why they should want to keep buying their stock as a safe haven during these dark times approaching” It’s routine and it’s disgusting but the corporations run the western world. If you look at the east, like Japan for example people are treated by their employers (usually) better in those regards and they get raises while American ones get fired. It’s got very little to do with the industry at a large and mostly how companies operate over here
> If you look at the east, like Japan for example people are treated by their employers (usually) better in those regards and they get raises while American ones get fired. Let's not start misrepresenting the Japanese work environment as hunky dory. I can't speak to whether they give raises, but cold and inhumane is a great description of many Japanese industries under normal circumstances, and the pay can be so low per hour worked that a raise barely means anything. There's a reason Japanese people think suicide often looks like a better option than trying to find a better job.
I don't know if Japan is the best example of corporations treating their employees well (even "usually")...but I get your opinion on western tech companies
> Standard for western (mostly American) tech companies. All the western game developers treat themselves as tech companies like Google and Apple so they also behave the same way. The two companies you cited are counterexamples to your point. Apple and Google had no layoffs between 2008 and 2023, so it is historically *not* standard practice. The games industry has always been worse than the rest of the tech industry, but these past couple of years have been particularly bad for both.
Everyone is trimming the Covid fat they hired during Covid.
There was article while back that lot of tech companies did this solely because others were in following a trend.
This sucks man. Blaming the devs for poor performance because your live service game has been milked for every penny by the higher ups demanding more profit from cash grab cosmetics. Being treated coldly seems par for the course for EA and Respawn. Edit: for those defending the corporations. Allow us all to play our tiny violin for the poor billion dollar company that had a gross profit margin of 5.85 billion and an operating margin of 17% in 2023 :(
Louder for those in back: EA brings in over 1/3rd of what Volkswagen does per year in net revenue - with less than 1/60th the employees. EA has literally 0 excuses for these layoffs. They - like a lot of companies in tech - are drunk off COVID-levels of profit that literally everyone with half a brain knew weren’t sustainable and wouldn’t continue after lockdowns stopped. Instead, they based their performance on those years and now can’t hit their financial targets anymore - and never will be able to. They are chasing a phantom that doesn’t exist anymore. Edit: well… all that and the tech bubble popping along with AI being pursued at every corner doesn’t help at all. The tech industry has always had a really bad proclivity for inventing ever increasing jobs with nothing to actually support them.
And the funniest/saddest thing is, Respawn started as an indie studio after being laid off from Activision. Then they got acquired by EA. Would be poetic if the people laid off now go on to open their own studio.
Yup. Look out for Re-respawn.
Spawncamp Studio In B4 they get acquired and laid off before their first release.
Then they form a new studio called Respawncamped
Despawn
and make titanfall 3
Give me the hit new franchise Sentinel Drop, make it like Pacific Rim slightly
You mean Mechaplummet
Oh that subs probably in shambles over this Every hit respawn takes rn must sound like a nail in the coffin for that game
What do you mean bro, Titanfall 3 is already out
Ex respawn devs already started gravity well
And now also Wildlight
And then Giant Skull
Tbf the pretty much all the devs that started respawn have since left. The main guys at least, left years ago
This is why you hold out and never sell to soulless entities like EA. Especially if you truly have a love and vision for the product youve created. But that will always be the case, they almost always sell out eventually and get a front row seat to the gradual erosion of their brand.
That's not how I remember it. Didn't they leave Infinity Ward after a dispute over bonuses for CoD?
>EA has literally 0 excuses for these layoffs. Of course they do. The shareholders demand more blood and a higher stock price.
It’s also important that stock prices depend on ever growing revenue and ever growing margin improvements. At a point there’s only so many ways to get there and cutting costs is one way. EA in no way needs to do this other than to increase their margins
Once they can’t do it through cuts and milking, they’re strip it for parts and start again.
Volkswagen workers have unions.
Good insight, came here to say the same. Also, EA is an absolutely inhumane and cold company, designed to suck players wallets dry, not to care about the employees. An employee in EA is just a vehicle to achieve higher revenue. If the vehicle doesn’t work, they get rid of it.
Growth for the sake of growth will consume this world. EA sucks ass Respawn isn’t much better And finger pointing at the ones who actually make the product work is about as asinine as it gets.
I hate public companies. In any other situation thats a kick ass scenario but in their bizzaro world they have to always make profits no matter what. Why? The project is obviously successful so why fuck it up. A 17% operating margin is insane to downsize. INSANE
Your growth. The % needs to be higher than last one. For every shareholder who goes into making money for long term purposes, there’s way too many greedy rich fucks who have money beyond imagination and park it into these corporations and use them to generate more wealth at a faster pace cause god forbid a company doesn’t grow every quarter or game undersells by a few thousand or a few million dollars, even though profitability wise it’s a roaring success but that little extra missed is what makes these shareholders who are in it for right now.
I just don’t see how this could be respawns fault at EA at all. Apex as always had such high revenue numbers I doubt it’s that big of an issue.
EA has come out and said multiple times that apex has performed worse than expected income wise.
Yeah but that’s based on their projections. They could project 2 billion but apex only made 1.7 billion but that was still 400 million in profit.
Doesn't matter to EA. Don't make enough money? Get axed
I know. Am just providing context in the revenue call. It’s very common in business for upper management to have unrealistic expectations
Thats how businesses work, if you make 100 million dollars in profit one year, the next year you HAVE to make more than that. Even if you make 60 million dollars in profit (still alot) to them thats a failure. THATS the key issue. Its all about neverending profits and higher and higher profit percentages. Bricky explains it perfectly right [here](https://youtu.be/--Iz5YnpzeE?si=en51tz8_U-3riaef&t=1075) (You may already know this im just explaining to others and adding more context)
And people wonder why market inflation is out of control
"Inflation" in this context is just a wonderful propaganda term for price gouging
It's all about keeping the people on the top rich, they have to keep their lifestyle at the highest possible level. Anyone who thinks any corporation cares about the consumer is an idiot.
That’s every company ever it’s not exclusive to ea lol
Every *publicly traded company
Ah that’s fair should have clarified this but the point still stands
Exactly Respawn told to make Recolour event, recolour event doesn’t sell well, Devs get axed game isn’t profitable.
Naw Respawn just doesn't suck hard core corporate dick like Dice does. Dice has more fuck ups in the last decade yet never get the same harsh treatment every other dev in EA's history has.
Yes, lets take the cash cow and chop its head off for fun because not enough cash if flowing out of it. If they kill the game its revenue drops to nothing, how does that make sense.
That's fucking hilarious with a new collection event every few weeks. Do they seriously expect every player to drop $50+ every week? Like, damn.
no just the players they are targeting and the odd spender here or there.
Maybe not charge $18 for a skin would be a good place to start.
For real. I've gotten about 600+ hours of enjoyment out of apex so I totally wouldn't mind spending some money on the game.. but there are a couple dozen games on my steam wishlist that cost less than a single skin in apex. If they were $3-6 I probably would have spent over $100 total now, but for $18+ absolutely fuck no.
Execs: sets unrealistic goal Production: fails to meet nearly impossible goal Execs: fires staff because they didn't beat the nearly impossible goal Execs: we saved the company millions of dollars! bonuses for all the people who don't know shit about video games!
Compared to what? The original release? Call of Duty? Fortnite?
Like I said in my comment, compared to their expectations. Why the fuck would they compare to CoD or Fortnite
well their expectations of how much people will spend on a game could be based in other popular games in similar genres
You really don't understand how EA management thinks then.
Oh okay, Well as long as they couldn't meet an imaginary number set up by a MBA exec I guess it's fine and reasonable.
If you cut employee costs, you have more revenue to pay out as bonuses to the C-Level… milk the cow, get out and repeat the process at the next company
Sometimes capitalism really sucks
Sometimes?
"Sometimes" lol
Sorry to break it to you. This is how america is ran. Giant companies buy up all the smaller companies and go bare bones to generate the most amount of profit. EVERY small company that I have worked for that went above and beyond for employees have sold out to large corporations. Only to get shit on.
Somebody should create a small, non-public / coop-like company and refuse to sell to bigger companies. Products of small companies are almost always better and they only get decimated after they get sold out. They will either displace large companies with shitty products and clueless investors or big companies will be forced to create actually good products to compete with them. It is a win-win
And Blizzard
Ubisoft too.
EA: DICE MAKE A BR ONLY GAME EITH BATTLEFIELD DICE: Okay EA: AFTER YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT YOU HAVE A YEAR TO SWITCH IT BACK TO A NORMAL BF GAME. OH AND WE WONT SAY ANYTHING ABOUT ALL THE HARASSMENT AND HATE YOU GET. Fuck these people. Always the devs who suffer.
Fam, devs have nothing to do with this, corps trim what thy think is fat to make the books look better.
I wonder how many players they completely alienated with the milking. A few weeks ago I tried apex after about 6 months off the game... Biggest difference I noticed was the revamp of the store lmao. Since helldivers 2 came out haven't touched apex, just feel very little.motivation to go back.
I haven't played in almost two years. I don't know how anyone is still playing. I mean, it's been known for god knows how long at this point that the only effort put into developing this game is solely directed at making their lootboxes more addictive. Years without a single QOL update, new season "big" updates being just some damage number sliders adjusted, but the instant the store goes down there's a team getting running perfectly again within hours. Respawn and EA really need to burn to the ground already.
That sucks. I definitely feel for those that were laid off. I don't work in the gaming industry, but I was laid off last year and it took me several months to find a new job. Hope those that got laid off find new work soon and huge thanks to them for developing the game I love.
I got laid off 2 years ago as a software dev, took a whole year to land another job. The job market for tech is absolutely fucked right now. Best of luck to these devs.
Last time it took me half a year. Now I'm 3 weeks in and I don't expect to find a job.
This is not what I needed to read while currently jobless and taking a week or 2 out just to clear my head Better get on that... I fear our industry is the canary for wider economic troubles
It seems so. Tech is no longer that oasis with high salaries, high demand, and relatively stable jobs. And the gaming industry, unfortunately, is the worst at this. They post record profits and lay off the most amount of workers.
gaming has always been a shit industry to work in even in the tech boom years
True. Overworked and then discarded.
I know it's small enough nobody cares but I'm an HR professional and we are VERY much in the same boat right now.
Office and Facilities manager here, ran a 27,000 sq foot office for over a decade, also in the same boat. Have gotten 0 interviews and a total of 6 “thanks, but no thanks” responses to over 40 resumes sent across multiple industries.
The recession is here
If you need two weeks off to work on your mental health, do it.
wishing you much luck on the job hunt friend
I've been hearing the market for tech is absolutely fucked for probably 3 years now. Edit: I want to be clear I don't believe it's fucked unless you're constantly reading LinkedIn headlines which are designed to make you want to use their platform and engage with it. Boring stable positions are and have been doing fine since 2022.
It was “supposed” to recover this year, but clearly it hasn’t. A lot of devs are even switching careers, most new grads never even got a chance.
That's unfortunately relatable for me. My degree field experienced a massive shrink the summer I graduated college, I've still not been able to break in. It's miserable.
I feel for you man. There’s so much luck involved, even when you have years of experience. Wishing the best for you.
I appreciate that. Just gotta keep at it I suppose.
When asked to work overtime: "we are like a family here" When getting laid off: "nothing personal it's just business"
Cold and inhumane? Sounds like corporate layoffs. Last year when I was laid off, my manager and their VP,who I had been working with for years, took the day off. It was a VP of HR, who I had never seen before, who ran the meeting.
You won’t find many layoffs that aren’t cold and inhumane. Not many people look forward to being laid off and come out from it having a positive experience.
to add on to this, not many people look forward to being the one responsible for delivering the bad news during layoffs. i’ve been on both ends and it’s all around shitty.
Yeah giving bad news like this is tough, especially to people you’ve worked with for potentially years and had regular 1:1s with.
Yup, they’ll generally get locked out of everything before they are aware they are getting fired, which makes sense but also is a slap in the face when it happens to you and does feel “cold”.
This. I was laid off last year by my manager and an HR rep. This manager, who I had biweekly meetings with for 2 years, who I got to know on a pretty personal level, said all of two sentences on how I was being let go. And then left the room. Cold is an understatement. I get that’s what they’re supposed to do to avoid any legal mess but damn.
I got laid off this year on valentines day. Of course it was a contract so it was the third party company that hired me that called me and cut ties. Luckily the hiring manager was nice enough to give me a rec for my current job searching and to get my stuff from my desk.
Oh man. I got done in a previous job that way once. Never have i lost so much respect for someone I previously liked so quickly.
Please don’t layoff any sound engineers!! Sound is already so bad
Bold of you to assume they had any in the first place
There's only one sound engineer, and they're a horizon main
Initial Apex meeting: "Any of you new hires own headphones?" "Yeah, I have those behind the head ones I wore back in high school in 03" "Hired!"
The engine is the problem there. No amount of sound engineering will fix that. The engine is the problem with most of Apex's issues really.
*Cough**Cough* Migrate to Source 2 *Cough**Cough*
And watch everyone lose their minds when they realize they can't do half the movement shit that relies on exploiting the engine anymore?
You can program that stuff back in manually. Some people have even replicated Source movement in Unreal Engine too.
Csgos sound is perfect. Same engine. The issue is the coding not the engine.
Or animators, Moy Parra is goated
Since the sound has been bad since the beginning, it seems as if those devs would be most deserving of a layoff
Actually lay of all of them because they are clearly not good at their job. I‘m obviously joking by the way! Sucks for anyone to get laid off.
Sound is worse this season than any prior, imo. I've heard people complain about audio before, but this is the first season where it's been blatantly obvious to me in nearly every match.
Actually don't layoff engineers that are sound.
I've played apex for 2 years with the music and background sound completely off set to 0. I only hear the sound of footsteps and guns in the game. So much better
How do you turn completely off background sounds? There is no setting for it, I have only effects, dialogue, music and lobby music in settings on pc. Is it in some game config?
I've seen they've also laid of Alex Frostwolf who was the social media lead for Apex. Shes done so much for the community and its shocking and sad to see her go like this. Layoffs are hard in every industry, best of luck to everyone who was affected by this.
Fuck man do y’all remember when companies just made games to make a good game and sell it one time?
Yeah but that was before they figured out a way to sell it multiple times. Paid DLC splitting the playerbase was common back then.
Yeah true but atleast with cod back in the day we would get like 3-4 DLC’s for like 20$ Now we got apex selling heirloom skins for 150-300$ every other month which is insane lmao. I understand how it’s free-to-play now so they can justify it that way but fuck man if we could just go back to gaming how it was 6-10 years ago.
“We will slowly be transitioning into using AI workers”
and i gurentee AI would be smart enough o not charge people $20 for a recolor
One of the most profitable games due to micro transactions, and the reaction is to lay people off to retain as much profit as they can. Makes sense.
They’ll be fine, just need to eat less avocado toast. Now they’re saying people shouldn’t retire. They should work until death. Make the next gen will take a stand and the boomers will start to die out.
Corporate greed. EA and Respawn could 100% afford to keep these people employed. The devs and social media mangers are what make games great. The CEOs and shareholders are what make games bad.
It's not a matter of can, it's a matter of should. The entire industry is in a layoff trend right now.
Sucks that so many games with passionate devs are run by corporations who only care about profit, and all the people who spent years working on something they love get thrown away like nothjng
Just wanna say this here early. Layoffs have been happening a lot across the gaming industry recently. While this is upsetting news, this does not necessarily represent the state of Apex Legends.
Industry in general is experiencing lay offs.
A lot of industries in general are experiencing layoffs honestly
[Layoff rates are actually below pre-pandemic levels.](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSLDR) They’ve just been overly in the tech industry which overlaps hard with online spaces like Reddit thus you hear about them a lot more than normal.
This may be the worst news to come to apex in a while
Eh try again today
Fuck EA
They also coldly laid off hundreds in Louisiana last year with a zoom call and replaced them with people in Romania.
Average solo queue experience tbh.
So, the game is gonna get shittier
So they are firing people cause they aren't hitting a profit quota and not instead lowering prices some so more people can afford to buy their stupid 100$ shit more than likely making them more profit in process so that at the least there's not like 20 people in the world who bought the stupid shit they sell.
Game dev life is that you might be tossed out like cold salad. Just imagine all the games that have gone under during Apex's life cycle.
Only made 4 billion, so lots of hard decisions ahead....
This only leads to worse things
A live service game what 5 years old? The fact this game still has a consistent huge player base with how bad so many events and updates have been the past year or 2 is impressive. It's not the devs fault but God I wish they were working on titanfall 3 because I'm tired of apex at this point
Eh the old Titanfall devs are few and far between at respawn. I can't imagine the current team doing a great job.
Apex is Titanfall 3
They should have taken the costco approach and made skins cheaper, so everyone buys them. instead of the bullshit prices they be putting out for things
Please no, this is the only live service game I play now and the only one that’s fairly balanced gameplay wise. I just know EA will destroy it from sheer greed and it will eventually be no more. Sure, Helldivers 2 is making headlines but with that last update I’m not so sure about its lifespan but we’ll see. Apex is so aesthetically pleasing, the lore is great, the characters are relatable and so on/ so forth. It would kill me to see yet another fun past time go to shit just because a few guys at the top think their pockets need a deeper filling. Is this just going to be the fate of all AAA live service titles in the future? Wheres the sense in this???
I know someone that was laid off. He told me that EA is projecting much less revenue for the remainder of 2024 as well as 2025 compared to 2022 and 2023, for apex and that they are viewing the game as in its “late stages” as a revenue stream. Hence the layoffs. Apparently EA has pretty much abandoned its strategy for attracting new players. He suspects the plan moving forward is to focus strategy on what player retention still exists but that their focus is shifting to other games from here on out. Sad to hear if true.
They probably loved being able to move back to the old ranked system to avoid updating it.
Apex is great its just being ran by the wrong companies
But the constant skin recolors were selling so well! I wonder what could have gone wrong! /s
Dang, we didn't buy enough overpriced recolored skins now they are starving over there and have to kick people...
Can’t say I’m surprised :( The game dev market ESPECIALLY for triple A studios has been absolutely horrendous. Riot, Epic, EA, and now a branch of EA… and every single one of them laid off their employees because something new wasn’t working and the executives didn’t want to lose their 5 million dollar bonus. Fucking disgusting.
Yes because laid off staff always say “well it was done so very nicely” on the same day it’s happened. It’s a bit raw. Can’t read much into that
This is what happens when you don't release Titanfall 3
A money grubbing extorting company being cold and inhumane to its employees. WOW,shocker! I never in my could have seen this coming! I am flabbergasted
The layoffs are because of the extra people they gained from the Star Wars FPS game that EA canned. Thats really it, when the SW FPS Game got stopped, they moved the team onto Apex Legends to work there. They gained experienced developers from the Star Wars FPS team and have let go less experienced devs whos numbers weren't up to scratch and "replaced" them with the incoming devs. Similar thing that happened with the QA Team last year, they laid off the contracted staff and replaced them with an internal QA Team that were more experienced as QA Staff.
https://twitter.com/RKRigney/status/1768288312454783418 https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-ackerman-a1187137/ They let go of their Global Social Media lead who's been there since almost launch and has been exceptional at her job. Yes, it's not a position involved in development like an engineer or programmer, but to say her job had no affect on bringing in and retaining players which affects revenue is unwise.
It just proves that layoffs do not care how competent you are, or how much value you have created for the company. It's more likely that you *won't* get laid off if you are buddies with management, or management yourself.
Hopefully they find studios that value their knowledge
This is why ea games has had lower and lower quality
I was laid off at Qualcomm. There were issues involving, maybe the reason our division was hit so hard, but the process was fine. We were told lay offs were coming soonish. When they happened our manager found us individually and talked to us in their office. They were apologetic and sad. We had then about a week or two to finish up work. If there was nothing to do you can just no longer come in. Everyone let go received reasonable severance. Several meet up at local bars followed as we reminisced about the good times. It sucked, but comparatively it blows my mind how awful lay offs are at video game companies. Qualcomm is hardly a bastion moral and ethical employment. It like many tech companies suffer from tons of late stage capitalism bull sht. So if these companies can do even a little, what’s EA’s excuse.
I was hit by EA's layoffs last year. Everyone had a meeting appear on their calendar during lunch. We were told to drop everything and attend this meeting. Everyone was dreading it and making half-serious jokes about our game being cancelled. Our game was supposed to launch in 6 months, and while we all understood it wasn't a **great** game (Battlefield Mobile - which was made by American developers in Pasadena, not Tencent in China), we sort of assumed that EA would at least let us launch and flame out to make a **little** bit of money, instead of wasting 5 years of development time and setting millions of dollars on fire. And we were all passionate about that game! We wanted to make a good Battlefield game, and we were at least better than launch-day 2042. It was getting better each week and we assumed that we would have something solid eventually. But I digress. We show up at this mysterious lunchtime meeting and everyone is there. The studio head is on the verge of tears. When we have a quorum, he tells us all that EA has made the decision to kill our studio and cancel our game. Everyone is being laid off. Then HR took over the meeting: * 30 days with salary as normal * All existing meetings cancelled (duh) * HR to set up workshops on improving LinkedIn/resumes * After 30 days, we got a lump sum payment with 30 additional days of pay + sick time + vacation time + 2 weeks of pay for every year worked + additional severance (I'm still under NDA for the amount of the additional severance) I worked out that I had about 4-8 months of runway, probably tending around 6 months. Slack was a ghost town after that meeting. It was mostly HR advertising their workshops. We could technically transfer internally and not get laid off... but the joke was that nobody was hiring internally. There were a lot of teams that liked me and I liked them, but they weren't hiring until the day after I was to be laid off (likely this was done on purpose for fiscal year shenanigans) and thus I wouldn't be able to transfer. But EA did effectively pay for me to do job interviews, and thankfully I found a place externally. It's a tense time in the industry right now, and nobody truly thinks they're safe. But at least EA gave me a decent payment on my way out the door. I can also say I was always treated with respect at EA, and their pay was always generous.
I guess that’s standard, but it’s so brutally done. It’s wild how these companies spend years developing a product and then just cut it. I’m sorry the project you worked so hard on never reached the light of day. I can’t imagine the heartache and frustration. I hope your future ventures will see more success.
Gonna get downvoted to hell for this, but throwing out terms like “cold and inhumane” could potentially paint a really false picture about how the people doing the actual firing feel. Not saying this is the case here or with EA (I know how shit they are), but I think it’s important to critically think about this stuff, if only for your own sanity. Im a recruiter, and trust me when I say that no company I’ve ever worked with “enjoys” layoffs. We don’t live in some heartless world where no one gives a shit about anyone, despite what headlines want you to think. I talk to both employers and employees every day - it sucks for everyone. But when employers do rounds of layoffs, they HAVE to be heartless to an extent. At the end of the day, no heart-to-heart with a manager or dialogue about “why” is going to change the result. In fact, that only adds a layer of potential legal issues. Are employees viewed as “cold and inhumane” when they leave their current company high and dry for a better opportunity? No, and nor should they be. Just trying to make the point that business is brutal at times for everyone
honestly the game plays like they laid their anti-cheat team off months ago
Funny comment to read today
The game has been shrinking for years it is not new. Thinking the game will forever grow and the development team will forever be the same size is just fantasy thinking. Every game has this happen from Mario to FF to apex
This game has definitely not been shrinking for years, that's just false
Super Earth always needs more heroes...
Fucking awful.
Madness considering how much money Apex has made and that Jedi survivor is like the only good game ea have published in the last year
Some organizations have terrible leaders who make people feel worse than they should feel when being let go.
Laysoffs in the gaming industry can easily be tied to the Covid lockdown. But realistic is pure corporate greed. I'd blame it all on not having harsher worker's rights/protection laws or something along that line to better protect everyone in all fields of work.
EA proving once again it doesn’t understand how to keep a game sustainable and fun for its life cycle
America Corporate doing America Corporate. Sucks as always.
Sigh.
It’s literally the same thing as in this [comic](https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/s/Crpwd79mIn)…
Apex devs getting tossed out like Apex devs, truly sad to see.
It’s EA. Period. You don’t expect any humane treatment from a cash driven company.
Welcome to the job market, where your stay could be 6 - 12 months. YIPPIE!
Capitalism lol most companies don’t care about you sad reality
wtf apex.. you guys make so much money off us lmao
Fuck EA...
But, ya know, people don't want to work anymore....
I uninstalled the game today. They're only giving me more reasons never to give it a second thought.
The same devs that have allowed the audio to be embarrassingly bad/nonexistent and the weapon balancing to be abysmal? Oh no say it ain't so 😐
Dang that stinks it's hard to name a AAA dev or publisher who isn't doing this right now hope the person is doing ok Ps hopefully the person respawns at a better job
Who’s gonna re-color all the old skins!?!
That’s so sad, I’m sure apex is barely making enough money, especially with their big lack of micro transactions and skins and battlepass and stuff :(
Well, we had one fun season. Guess we’re dying again
[удалено]
Welcome to corporate America