EA lays off as many as 400 staff, cancels Titanfall project

Electronic Arts (EA) is reportedly eliminating “between 300 and 400” positions across its organization, including 100 at Respawn Entertainment, alongside cancelling a project within the Titanfall franchise that the studio was working on.

In a statement posted to X, the company confirmed that it had to “step away from two early-stage incubation projects” alongside making what they called “targeted team adjustments” across the people responsible for Apex Legends and Star Wars Jedi.

One of the scrapped projects, codenamed R7, was supposed to be a new addition to the Titanfall family of video games. According to Bloomberg, this was supposed to be an extraction shooter set in the Titanfall universe. The other one, reported by IGN, was supposed to be another multiplayer FPS title, with past job postings on LinkedIn supporting these rumours.

“We’ve made select changes within our organization that more effectively aligns teams and allocates resources in service of driving future growth,” EA spokesperson Justin Higgs told Bloomberg.

As stated earlier, Respawn Studios has reportedly laid off around 100 employees. Those affected are a mix of developers, publishing, and QA workers assigned to Apex Legends and a smaller group of the Star Wars Jedi team. According to IGN, some of the employees who were assigned to the two cancelled incubation projects have also been let go. Other affected members were moved to projects like EA Motive’s Iron Man game or the Battlefield series.

In addition to these changes, Respawn’s SVP of Operations, Daniel Suarez, is now the studio’s General Manager and will report directly to the co-founder and CEO, Vince Zampella. In 2021, Zampella was put in charge of the Battlefield franchise as part of an internal shakeup at EA.

Source: The Verge

Header image credit: Respawn Entertainment