Pictured: PopCap Dublin employees at a company pajama party.
Associate producer John Vaughan of PopCap Dublin made official today the news that the Irish studio is closing its doors.
Job cuts hit multiple arms of the social and mobile game giant last month with studios in Seattle, Dublin and Shanghai all laying off workers. These August redundancies were accompanied by remarks from EA Labels boss Frank Gibeau telling Bloomberg that:
Typically at EA what we do when we acquire a company is we make sure that we go slow initially and really understand the culture of the company. And then we look for whether there’s opportunities to integrate the companies – and then we accelerate.
So with PopCap, what we found is that there are some areas inside PopCap that were duplicative what EA was doing; a lot of central resources, legal, business affairs those types of things so we accelerated the integration there.
[…]
We also looked at pivoting a little bit harder towards mobile and away from social so we made some adjustments there.
Why these workers’ employment was deemed incompatible with pushes toward mobile development is not so clear. We’ll bring you more when EA issues a statement.
