Morale Has Been Terrible” – EA Workers Criticise Distribuidora’s Cost-Cutting After Latest Layoffs

Image: Nintendo Life

Last week, legendary RPG studio BioWare announced that it was shutting down as part of EA’s latest round of layoffs. It was one of many studios hit by cuts from the company on the same day, which supposedly wiped out around 400 jobs.

One week on, several current and former EA employees have anonymously spoken to Vertical Slice about their time at the publisher. Unsurprisingly, they paint a rather bleak picture of what it’s like behind closed doors in 2026.

The big unifier between many of the accounts is how divorced the studio execs seem from their staff. “Morale has been terrible,” one source told Vertical Slice on the forced introduction of AI software and changing work practices. “The line we kept hearing is ‘do less, better’ but it just felt like we were doing the same amount with fewer people. Upper management was very excited about Claude and the possibilities of [generative] AI, much to the chagrin of my team.”

It’s hardly the first time we’ve heard EA bang the ‘AI is the future’ drum, but it’s still depressing to hear how it is being implemented into years of generational talent. “They won’t tell you these tools are a mandate,” one worker continued, “but they’ll make it impossible or very difficult for you to do your job without [them].”

And even those jobs are changing. EA is one of the many AAA studios chasing an impossible live-service model, with all projects that aren’t ‘Fortnite-but‘ being pushed to the sidelines, before the developers of those forced projects are punished for their failure. “EA executives cannot fail, only be failed,” another staffer told the outlet, “They’ve been fortunate that [EA Sports FC] sells and makes so much money that it can finance their bad bets.”

And so we arrive at the layoffs. According to those who spoke to the outlet, EA’s layoff procedure is strangely gatekeepy and “secretive”, with teams (and occasionally managers) not being informed of who, specifically, is being cut. Aside from messing up project workflows, this also means that the human connection is removed from every departure, with friends and colleagues not knowing who’s still there until they see it crop up on social media or LinkedIn. “Part of the devastating emotional impact is basically finding out your friend and co-worker has been let go again and again and again over the course of weeks,” said one worker.

Several former-EA staff said that they were invited to a chat-less Zoom meeting to inform them of their contract termination, with all other participants hidden: “You’re getting laid off because you’re just numbers on a list. There’s never an understanding of the actual project [you’re working on].”

Somewhat hilariously, it seems that the studio has offered some of those affected by the layoffs a ‘grace period’, where they can find a different role in the company. Aside from enforced in-office working hours, many are refusing the offer for the simple reason that they don’t want to keep working for a company that has treated them so badly. “It’s a joke,” one ex-employee said, “I didn’t even bother looking [at the internal roles] because I don’t want to work at this place anymore.”

The latest round of layoffs come after EA was picked up by Saudi Arabia’s PIF, lumping the studio with around $18 billion of debt. In an internal letter to its remaining staff, the publisher announced that it will prioritise its sports series, Apex Legends, Star Wars Jedi and Battlefield projects moving forward.