After last week’s shuttering of Mass Effect and Dragon Age studio BioWare, workers at EA are beginning to speak out, and they’re not happy.
In a new report by Chris Kerr at Vertical Slice, multiple sources from within the company sounded off about how everything feels while working at any of the company’s various studios, and to put it bluntly, the vibes are trash. And to no one’s surprise, some of it has to do with higher-ups pushing generative AI “to see how few people they can keep employed and still make a video game.”
“Morale has been terrible,” one source told Vertical Slice. “The line we kept hearing is ‘do less, better’ but it just felt like we were doing the same amount with less people. Upper management was very excited about Claude and the possibilities of [generative] AI, much to the chagrin of my team.”
“The message from every single manager I’ve heard is ‘this is the future, you have to get onboard,” said one person.
Amid EA’s announcements last week that it would “continue investing in its sports games, the online shooter Apex Legends and action-adventure projects, including the next Star Wars Jedi title and a new game starring Marvel’s Iron Man,” along with DICE and Respawn working together on a new title, likely a new Star Wars Battlefront.
“They’ve been fortunate that [EA Sports FC] sells and makes so much money that it can finance their bad bets,” another source said.
Vertical Slice said that numerous sources they spoke to all “expressed a striking sense of detachment and resentment towards their employer,” and went so far as to describe the company as “a cold dead place that’s slowly decaying as leadership pilfers every last cent, leaving the rest of us to worry about how we feed our families.”
And with more layoffs possible (if not extremely likely), one can only wonder how any of these games will get made if morale truly is this low.
