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EA Fires 5% of Its Staff 49

Posted by Zonk from the when-games-stop-being-fun dept.
JorgeDeLaCancha writes "On the heels of the dispute between EA and Ubisoft, EA has recently announced the decision to fire five percent of their workforce, approximately 350 people. EA's recent announcement has nothing to do with game sales, but rather 'It's more reconciling the costs of learning new systems with what the needs of the new systems are.'"
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EA Fires 5% of Its Staff More

EA Fires 5% of Its Staff

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  • So the guys who are already working like 100 hour weeks will have to do 105 now?

  • Heh. (Score:2, Troll)

    by SatanicPuppy ( 611928 )
    Good thing they're not as evil [slashdot.org] as that "Ubisoft" company.
    • Actually it is a good thing. Since they don't have their workers signed to a non compete clause they are free to work for another game company. Depending on how the clauses are worded at Ubisoft they would be fired but still unable to work for a competitor (or possibly even do their own game development) for a certain period of time.

      • Re:Heh. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Phisbut ( 761268 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @03:01PM (#14628469)
        Actually it is a good thing. Since they don't have their workers signed to a non compete clause they are free to work for another game company. Depending on how the clauses are worded at Ubisoft they would be fired but still unable to work for a competitor (or possibly even do their own game development) for a certain period of time.

        Former Ubisoft-Montreal employee here. Their non-compete clause is only enforceable if you quit, not if they fire you or lay you off or however you call it. It's to prevent developers from willfully going to the competitor.

        • Of course employees should never have the freedom to choose where they will work, that is for their corporate masters decide. Where you will work, how much you will get paid, an abridged right to free speach (only as approved by corporate PR), all your ideas are theirs (before and after employment), independent after hours work (if you have any energy left it should be donated to your corporate masters) and finally the only right the corporations give to their employess - the right to get "layed off" after

  • Wow (Score:3, Funny)

    by ZakuSage ( 874456 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @12:14PM (#14626517)
    They have a lot of employees... no wonder they're able to churn out so many [re-]releases every year!

  • atleast they got treated semi-well when laid off.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by tont0r ( 868535 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @12:25PM (#14626639)
    My friend was one of the people who was cut. He was given a nice severance package. He gets paid like normal until April. When April hits, he gets 1 months pay and gets to cash his vacation hours in. Also during the time between now and April, he still gets more vacation time.

    However, they said he would have to come back the next day to get his stuff from his cube. He wasnt allowed to get it that day. Also, the second he was let go, all his access to the building was removed. I suppose that is just a precaution if the employee goes nuts though. :P
    • That is pretty good treatment. Salary for 3 months, then a 1 month bonus, then vacation pay, which is anywhere from 2-4 weeks. So approx. 5 months pay severance total. That's an excellent deal. Last time I was laid off, I got 2 paychecks and unused vacation time. And considering I had just come back from vacation two weeks before, wasn't much. And I was there 5 years. And it was a full half of the company that got laid off.

      • Re:atleast they got treated semi-well when laid of (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        That's not how it's always been.

        When I was laid off by EA, all I got was two weeks plus vacation, and a month to exercise remaining stock options. And they didn't help me out with the losses incurred by selling my house too fast after buying it, even though I bought it on assurances from one of the bigwigs that the company was fine.

        I will never work in games again, let alone EA, except perhaps as a contractor via a third party. (I actually did that last year -- and not only was the client EA, but the proje
    • From what you describe, the severance packages seem to vary quit a bit. Your friend gets regular pay for the next 2 months followed by vacation pay-out. One of my friends got 3 months salary in a single lump-sum payment that came with his pink slip, and will get a 4th month in lump sum if he agrees to sign a departure agreement. He was just a junior slave and hadn't been there very long, so it's not like he got a better deal by virtue of his position or tenure. Getting escorted from the building is appa

  • Not fired... (Score:4, Informative)

    by lightspawn ( 155347 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @12:28PM (#14626668) Homepage
    EA lays off 5% of its staff. Big difference.
    • Do they have a chance of being rehired? Is there not enough work for them so that they had to be let go? If not, these people were fired. Laid off implies some hope of return.
    • The way I see it, "fired" and "laid off" are equivalent. They were involuntarily terminated for whatever reason the employer made up, and I'm sure the two terms are treated equally when future work is sought.

      • Re:Not fired... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Drachemorder ( 549870 ) <brandonNO@SPAMchristiangaming.org> on Thursday February 02, 2006 @01:27PM (#14627396) Homepage
        I'm sure the two terms are treated equally when future work is sought.

        Why do you think that? If someone is "laid off" it implies that there's something wrong with the company. If he's "fired" it implies there's something wrong with the employee. Companies fire people because they're bad employees; they lay them off for business reasons that often don't have anything at all to do with whether or not the employee is good at his job.

        If I were a manager looking to hire someone, if I knew he'd been laid off I wouldn't hold that against him, but if I knew he'd been fired I would be very curious as to the reason.

      • "Fired" generally means that a person was terminated for some reason directly related to their work performance or some portion of their personal work-related activities, while "laid off" generally means that the termination was due to elements completely outside the person's control.

        Unemployment benefits are generally available to the latter group with very little question (the employer makes the situation known to the state), while the qualifying for such benefits depends on specific circumstances in the
    • They were liberated from the tyranny of working at EA.
  • I'm glad that EA is making these cuts, I'm sure they're pretty strapped for cash, and this is the cause of their subpar titles.
    *phew* I'm relieved.
  • 'It's more reconciling the costs of learning new systems with what the needs of the new systems are.'

    I keep trying to read through this and understand what they are trying to say, but every time I do, my internal parser hits a run time error.

    Could a grammar nazi out there please change the syntax from PR Babble to English?

  • My boyfriend was also part of that 5% (Score:5, Informative)

    by Hannah E. Davis ( 870669 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @01:58PM (#14627760) Journal
    As one of the more junior guys on the Need for Speed team, it really wasn't surprising that my boyfriend was caught in this round of layoffs. However, I find it a bit ironic that they would lay anyone off on one of their most profitable teams -- Most Wanted was top of the charts in Britain during the Christmas season (beating out even FIFA) and pretty damn popular in Europe and North America. Cutting on the teams that were actually losing money/not making enough of a profit would've made more sense to me.

    He's not too choked up over it, though. I think he's more stressed than he's letting on, but he's been looking at the bright side: they're paying him quite well for the next few months to play the very game that caused their profits to drop *cough*WoW*cough* while he searches for a new and hopefully better job. Given that EA made him work 80+ hours per week last summer, including at least one occasion when he slept at the office on a Sunday night, this is probably a good time for him to find a job with more reasonable hours. Working every weekend for more than half the dev cycle of a game just ain't cool.

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