Yesterday, Respawn revealed that they had layoffs in the studio, leading to two unannounced games being cancelled. Today we have some rumors about these layoffs from Jason Schreier.
Reporting for Bloomberg, Schreier claims that EA laid off between 300 to 400 employees across various studios. 100 of those laid off were from Respawn, so we don’t know yet the extent of layoffs from other game developers.
EA spokesperson Justin Higgs shared this statement on behalf of the company:
“As part of our continued focus on our long-term strategic priorities, we’ve made select changes within our organization that more effectively aligns teams and allocates resources in service of driving future growth.”
Interestingly, Schreier supports claims that there was a Titanfall game in development, though some may not consider it a ‘real’ Titanfall 3. This Titanfall game was codenamed R7 and was actually an extraction shooter. Schreier says that it was far from being ready to release.
For his part, Jeff Grubb made these claims on Twitter:
“That Steve Fukuda project is in the bin. Laying off a ton of people. There is no Titanfall 3 — as this should make clear. I don’t think people realize just how much EA Football Club and Apex Legends missed last year. Dragon Age isn’t even a factor compared to those two.”
We can’t account for the differing accounts between Schreier and Grubb, but you may wonder what the people who shared the Titanfall 3 rumor recently thought of this. For those who don’t remember, Rebs Gaming spread the word on the rumor at the start of this month, citing YOROTSUKI and Osvaldatore as his sources. We didn’t find any comment from Osvaldatore, but YOROTSUKI said this:
“When I woke up, a lot of people were saying ttf3 is real, which is great.
But unfortunately they killed the game.
Okay Absolute EA moment
Anyway, they also almost killed the ALGS team. Let’s get a taste of the extreme chaos that the ALGS will bring us tomorrow.”
So, between two of our three sources, it looks like there was a lot of layoffs in Respawn, making Apex Legends and also the Titanfall extraction shooter. We don’t know if EA or Respawn will chime in on this further, but we think it would be a good idea if they reassured Apex Legends players at this moment.
As always, we hope the best for the developers who are leaving EA, and hope they can find placement back in the video game industry. At this point, it’s clear that the industry is now looking for growth opportunities to end this three year wave of layoffs. We’re all hopeful that the Switch 2 and potentially some upcoming AAA games like Grand Theft Auto 6 will provide those opportunities.
