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[Kotaku] EA Lays Off 350 People In Marketing, Publishing, Analytics
- Thread starter dex3108
- Start date
EA needs to find a better balance between monetization and quality. They made a lot of money in the short run, but damaged their public image and are now reaping the long-term costs.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/ea-gave-outgoing-exec-patrick-soderlund-a-20-milli/1100-6461170/
"nclear why he's going, but it appears EA really wanted him to stay. Back in June, EA disclosed in a government filing with the SEC that it paid Soderlund a $20 million bonus for the purpose of supporting the "longer-term retention of Mr. Soderlund.""
"It was also confirmed in the SEC filing that Soderlund's salary for fiscal 2018 (that being April 2017 through March 2018) was $821,539, which was a 28 percent increase from the previous year. Soderlund's employment agreement also netted him $46.2 million in stock-based awards for the fiscal year. Combined with other forms of compensation, Soderlund's total pay package for the fiscal year was more than $48 million, which is higher than all the other executives at EA including CEO Andrew Wilson."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-design-chief-among-raises-to-keep-top-talent
"
Patrick Soderlund, who runs EA Worldwide Studios, was the highest paid of the company's leaders, receiving equity awards totaling $46.3 million, while Chief Executive Officer Andrew Wilson received $35.7 million in total pay, a 79 percent increase from a year earlier, the Redwood City, California-based company said Friday in a regulatory filing. The increases resulted from special equity awards in recognition of the firm's financial performance over the past four years.
The board "determined that incentivizing and retaining these key executives was critical to the company's continued strong growth and success," according to the filing."
if only EA stopped wasting so much money on CEO's
"nclear why he's going, but it appears EA really wanted him to stay. Back in June, EA disclosed in a government filing with the SEC that it paid Soderlund a $20 million bonus for the purpose of supporting the "longer-term retention of Mr. Soderlund.""
"It was also confirmed in the SEC filing that Soderlund's salary for fiscal 2018 (that being April 2017 through March 2018) was $821,539, which was a 28 percent increase from the previous year. Soderlund's employment agreement also netted him $46.2 million in stock-based awards for the fiscal year. Combined with other forms of compensation, Soderlund's total pay package for the fiscal year was more than $48 million, which is higher than all the other executives at EA including CEO Andrew Wilson."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-design-chief-among-raises-to-keep-top-talent
"
Patrick Soderlund, who runs EA Worldwide Studios, was the highest paid of the company's leaders, receiving equity awards totaling $46.3 million, while Chief Executive Officer Andrew Wilson received $35.7 million in total pay, a 79 percent increase from a year earlier, the Redwood City, California-based company said Friday in a regulatory filing. The increases resulted from special equity awards in recognition of the firm's financial performance over the past four years.
The board "determined that incentivizing and retaining these key executives was critical to the company's continued strong growth and success," according to the filing."
if only EA stopped wasting so much money on CEO's
While I do agree with the general sentiment, his tenure has not been a trainwreck for the company as a whole. EA is now a towering monolith thanks to his success.
And while their franchise pillars are coming crumbling down, they have just struck gold with Apex Legends... which will likely buy them a lot of time. Coupled with the success of EA Access, they have some solid safety nets in place now to cushion their fall.
So it's far too soon to be calling time of death on his tenure unfortunately...
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Do you seriously think that these layoffs are happening because EA is pivoting away from the live-service model?
Also analytics is not necessarily related to user monetization - it can be about business, marketing or product. Any company the size of EA needs lots of analysts to generate insight.
I think they are playing a game called "destroying people lives."
WHO IS THIS CREATURE BEHIND THIS IDEA?
making people lose their jobs while your company is profiting... those profits won't be there without these people hard work.
WHO IS THIS CREATURE BEHIND THIS IDEA?
making people lose their jobs while your company is profiting... those profits won't be there without these people hard work.
If anything Marketing is what keeps them in the game. Because it sure as hell wasn't game quality that got Anthem to top the February NPDs.
Fucking hell man, this is terrifying for me. I've been looking for another full-time job since October. All of my experience is in the gaming industry as a reporter / website manager, and I'm trying to make the move into marketing, PR, and data. All I've seen since I started my job hunt are major publishers GETTING RID of practically everyone not involved in dev / engineering. I'm fucked.
I won't pretend to know any of the specifics about this...but having said that, if this is truly the marketing people being hurt the most by these layoffs, I'll bet that's a simple cold reckoning of the fact that most successful video game marketing these days is done by people that are not your employees. With the death of traditional games media - at a high level it doesn't matter anymore, folks, sorry to say it - and the rise of Twitch, they probably compared their internal marketing activities to Apex Legends (very small) to those of Battlefield and Anthem (very large) and realized the old way of marketing doesn't work anymore.
There's no reason to keep hundreds of people doing jobs that don't matter anymore.
In my opinion, many of those people could be re-trained and effective in some other roles instead of being laid off - but - you also can't take a marketing/PR person and turn them into an animator or programmer without tremendous expense with no guarantee of it yielding results.
The world of games marketing has completely, totally flipped on its head in the last 3 years. Relatively speaking, the things that marketing used to spend a lot of time and money doing - courting the games press, holding special events, writing and sending press releases, spending tons of money of TV and magazine advertisements - don't deliver any value anymore. The things that do matter - millions of viewers on Twitch and YouTube - do deliver value, but that doesn't necessarily match the skill set of a traditional marketing account rep.
Sad but true. And this is from someone who does this for a living. It's all changed, and it changed so fast a lot of people still haven't fully realized it. Not even sure that I have, although we are so small and nimble we can react much more quickly than a lot of others.
There's no reason to keep hundreds of people doing jobs that don't matter anymore.
In my opinion, many of those people could be re-trained and effective in some other roles instead of being laid off - but - you also can't take a marketing/PR person and turn them into an animator or programmer without tremendous expense with no guarantee of it yielding results.
The world of games marketing has completely, totally flipped on its head in the last 3 years. Relatively speaking, the things that marketing used to spend a lot of time and money doing - courting the games press, holding special events, writing and sending press releases, spending tons of money of TV and magazine advertisements - don't deliver any value anymore. The things that do matter - millions of viewers on Twitch and YouTube - do deliver value, but that doesn't necessarily match the skill set of a traditional marketing account rep.
Sad but true. And this is from someone who does this for a living. It's all changed, and it changed so fast a lot of people still haven't fully realized it. Not even sure that I have, although we are so small and nimble we can react much more quickly than a lot of others.
Do they fall for it, though? Like, I get that companies are expected to be as weasely and mealy-mouthed as possible, and never specifically state "we want to make more money", but why even bother doing the stupid dance?
And if you're going to do it, why go insipidly over-the-top?
Like, why not "Great games will continue to be at the core of everything we do, and we are thinking differently about how to entertain and retain our players"?
This is all very true as well. And Apex Legends was probably a big catalyst for this decision; given how its success was built entirely using Youtube/Twitter influencers.
Expect EA to be making even greater use of these platforms going forward. The days of above-the-line advertising as the main driving force of game marketing are dead and buried.
I think they must. I read that message as, "Don't worry investors, though it looks like this could affect your bottom line, we are committed to making you way more money than we have."
It's coded to be both good for investors and be as deflecting as possible for the company. They can't say "we fired a bunch of people" because then they'd have to admit they hurt people's livelihoods instead of "hit a temporary bump in their quest for gaming dominance."
Probably the notion that they want to be the world's greatest games company. They're probably not even top 10 at the moment.
While it always sucks when people lose their jobs, video game marketing has changed a lot in just the last couple years. I can easily see how positions at large companies like EA could quickly become redundant or obsolete. I know it's fun to hate on EA, but things like this happen all the time in business as markets change and shift.
Twitch/YouTube marketing works very well for competitive games that feature player versus player interaction but it doesn't do anywhere near as well for single player or cooperative games, they just don't get as much interest. You'll get games that pop for a week at launch, like Anthem or Sekiro, but there's very few with any longevity.
They'd be better off allocating ad budget on YouTube/Twitch preroll ads instead of magazine or - increasingly - TV spend, but laying their hopes all on Twitch/YouTube to market anything but a competitive shooter is asking for disaster. People are pinning an awful lot on Apex Legends as 'the future' of gaming marketing, but that's a free to play product...try that kind of launch with an $80 price tag on it (for Canadians :D ) and see how it goes.
I know EA are seen as a kind of evil pantomime villain and Andrew Wilson is clearly a cunt. But anyone in a traditional gaming marketing role at the moment ought to start thinking about retraining as your skill are no long as valuable as they were.
Is anything going particularly well in the "boxed product" side of EA? It doesn't seem like BFV or Anthem will hit expectations. Does most of their money come from loot boxes (FIFA, Apex, etc) these days? I don't know if I've ever seen a bigger dip in how many games I purchase from a particular publisher from one hardware cycle to the next, Konami notwithstanding.
Activision still holds the crown, 800 layoffs versus 350. It sucks, but in usual tradition, Activision sucks the most ass.
"They can invest time or invest money. It's their choice!"
Sounds so bad coming from a suit lmao
But he's good for the investors. That's what matters. Only. It's disgusting.
Imagine that one bonus to the outgoing executive. How many different people's years salaries that could have been. And the guy was leaving. That's why trickle down is bullshit.
These days that's the case in literally every industry outside family-run businesses where you share the name on the building.
Feel terrible for those impacted. Disagree that it's been a terrible year for the industry. Industry is growing. It's also shifting. That shift is causing some positions to be less needed. Activision's layoffs also were mostly in marketing and publishing. After EAs success launching Apex using nothing more than a few media events and Youtubers, they've probably found traditional marketing is becoming more and more obsolete.
To me this is more a sign of times for people within marketing rather than the gaming industry as a whole. If you're in marketing or positions related to it (sales), you are expendable because Ninja is cheaper, doesn't receive benefits or compensation when you stop using him and he's more effective.
Edit: I also believe this would've happened even if EA made record profits this year. Making record profits isn't stopping other corporations in other industries from cuts in 2019.
To me this is more a sign of times for people within marketing rather than the gaming industry as a whole. If you're in marketing or positions related to it (sales), you are expendable because Ninja is cheaper, doesn't receive benefits or compensation when you stop using him and he's more effective.
Edit: I also believe this would've happened even if EA made record profits this year. Making record profits isn't stopping other corporations in other industries from cuts in 2019.