After recently hiring a handful of new playtesters, EA has announced that over 200 quality assurance testers are being laid off.
Three sources reached out to Kotaku to reveal that the hundreds of quality assurance testers were laid off via a surprise Zoom call earlier today, February 28. Most of the quality assurance testers were working out of a Baton Rogue, Louisiana office testing Apex Legends.
Apex Legends has been having a very successful 2023, so this news does not bode well with the gaming community.
According to Kotaku’s report, the QA testers were invited to an unscheduled Zoom meeting earlier today. The mandatory meeting came as a surprise to employees since it wasn’t mentioned beforehand.
The meeting ended up being with Magnit Global, the contracting agency that got the testers their position with Respawn Entertainment, the developer behind EA’s battle royale. At that point, every employee at the meeting was told they were being laid off.
The three anonymous sources that were present for the Zoom meeting stated that the news was a shock to everyone, including full-time supervisors who were allegedly not told this was happening beforehand. The impacted employees were told they could collect their personal belongings from the office with security supervision.
EA gave the former employees 60 days severance. Unfortunately, many employees had contracts that were supposed to go much longer than the next month.
The Baton Rouge office has become home to QA support for Apex Legends once the game was launched in 2019. Employees are now concerned about the quality of the testing going forward since all of the established testers were removed abruptly despite years of experience.
It’s currently unclear what led to the mass layoffs at EA, but the company previously announced that Apex Legends Mobile and another in-development mobile game were being canceled. This could be due to Industrial Toys, the studio working on the upcoming Battlefield mobile game, shutting down last year. But it also seems like a decision made for financial reasons, especially after letting go of so many employees.
EA made big cuts to its customer service team last year, outsourcing the work to vendors in Europe and India. It seems like the most recent wave of layoffs is part of a trend in EA and beyond. The gaming and esports industries have continued to report massive layoffs, from Beyond the Summit shutting down to OpTic Gaming and Team Liquid letting go of a large amount of employees.
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