Electronic Arts (EA) is expected to layoff between 500 to 1,000 employees this week, reports Silicon Valley blog Startup Grind.
That represents up to 11 per cent of the company’s total staff, according to numbers released in EA’s latest financial statement on March 31. The video game publisher has four Canadian offices including Montreal, Edmonton’s BioWare, and Burnaby, B.C.’s development studio. The Burnaby location is EA’s largest development studio. In all, there are more than 2,000 EA employees in Canada.
But EA is responding to the news by saying that any layoffs this week are about reorganizing, not downsizing.
“EA is growing and looking to hire hundreds of people for our digital, console, mobile and social games. Like all game companies, we make occasional adjustments to resize teams as projects are completed and new priorities are established. Overall, we expect that headcount will be up at the end of this year,” says John Reseburg in a statement e-mailed to ITBusiness.ca.
EA also denied layoffs to gaming design blog Develop. “We always have projects growing and morphing… at anygiven time there are new people coming in and others leaving.
EA restructured its Vancouver-based operations as recently as February, cutting a small number of jobs at that time. The company told media it was shifting its operations to focus more on non-console formats such as social games, and free-to-play online games.
BioWare develops the popular Xbox series Mass Effect and the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Star Wars: The Old Republic.
The career opportunities site for EA currently lists 80 jobs open in Canadian locations.
