Yesterday, it was revealed that publisher Electronic Arts laid off about 3% of its global workforce, resulting in about 400 people losing their jobs.
While the big news of the day was BioWare getting shut down, it seems even developers who were working on super-successful games also got affected.
Case in point: Battlefield 6 — the game that EA proudly touted as the best-selling premium game of 2025, despite releasing in October.
Battlefield Studios Stable of Teams Affected by Recent EA Change of Ownership
Earlier this year in March, EA laid off staff across all of Battlefield Studios –– the name EA coined for the development teams that are all helping DICE craft the first-person shooter franchise. Aside from DICE, Criterion, Motive Studio, and Ripple Effect all fall under the BF Studios banner.
Fast forward to August: EA was acquired by the Saudi investment group PIF (Public Investment Fund), where it was also reported that mass layoffs were planned.
As expected, no formal announcement from any of the dev teams under the Battlefield Studios banner was made when it comes to layoffs, but Vertical Slice managed to verify that multiple developers from Ripple Effect and Motive were affected.
Some of the personnel laid off from Ripple Effect include: Character Artist Corey Thomas, Outsourcing Artist Brandon Garcia, and Technical Arts Turner Spring. Each individual’s LinkedIn profile confirmed the redundancies.
As for Motive Studio, Concept Artist Brandon Le, Senior Gameplay Designer Jamieson Shearer are confirmed to have been laid off.
For now, it’s unclear how many jobs were affected at Ripple Effect and Motive. For those unfamiliar with the studio’s work, Ripple Effect is the studio handling Battlefield Portal, while Motive worked on Battlefield 6’s single-player campaign. At present, Motive is developing EA’s Iron Man game, which the publisher confirmed was still in development two months ago in response to a leaked trailer.
Important to note that the internal memo shared by EA yesterday praised Battlefield 6 as a “great success.”
In our Shooters business, Battlefield 6 was a great success, and we learned a lot from the launch and the live service. We’re going to take those learnings, balance our resources, and leverage the technology to deliver a shooter portfolio that unlocks growth. In addition to our future Battlefield titles, we’ll be bringing together our Respawn and DICE studios to collaborate on a future project that will help us achieve that ambition. We can’t wait to share more when the time comes. We’re also continuing to invest heavily in Apex over the next few years by introducing brand new gameplay modes in multiplayer, and other new experiences, to expand the universe.
Needless to say, the games industry is not in a good state right now, as even if you’re working on the development teams who released the best-selling premium game of last year, your job still isn’t safe.
Season 5 of Battlefield 6 just launched, and DICE got a ton of flak from the community after it was discovered that some of its cosmetics looked suspiciously made by AI. Not only that, but at the start of the season, the devs even added a daily XP cap, which was later removed and chalked as something “unintended.”
Thankfully, it seems DICE isn’t affected, and for good reason, as the studio is rumored to be partnering with Respawn Entertainment to develop Star Wars Battlefront 3.
We here at MP1st wish everyone affected lands on their feet ASAP.
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