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Video game union workers rally against $55B private acquisition of EA

321 points by ksec 1y ago

ryandrake 1y ago
> "EA is not a struggling company," the statement reads. "With annual revenues reaching $7.5 billion and $1 billion in profit each year, EA is one of the largest video game developers and publishers in the world." Seems to be a common theme in 2025: Actually-healthy companies cosplaying as struggling companies, as an excuse to justify layoffs and other activities that transfer wealth and power from employees to management and shareholders. Like, does anyone think any of these BigTech (and MediumTech) companies who are all doing layoffs are really "struggling" and "vulnerable"? It's always just an unbelievable excuse.
- glimshe 1y ago
  This is multifaceted question. I agree with what you're saying, but let me add something. Corporations are greedy and let go of many good people. But they also let go of many people who deserved to go. It's really hard to get rid of bad people, even in the US. But you wouldn't believe how many bad people were in big tech because of the COVID over hiring. I've seen dozens, if not hundreds of people, who went to FAANG and added next to no value. As a manager in one of these companies, I had to deal with a mix of great people and many who were absolutely taking advantage of the company. I could write a book about it. Good for them, but it's not surprising that the party would end someday.
  - eli_gottlieb 1y ago
    > It's really hard to get rid of bad people, even in the US. Could you explain why it's hard? I've never seen anyone run into any kind of difficulty letting go an at-will employee. The manager can do so at any time, for any reason or no reason at all.
    - mikestew 1y ago
      And the company can be sued at any time, for any reason or no reason at all. That does not mean the plaintiff will win, but against deep enough pockets, it can be worth a try. PIPs take time, and HR isn’t about to let you skip them, and bad employees know they’ve got six months to spend their workday looking for a new job while not doing their current job. I’ve worked at those companies, and sometimes managed at same, and when OP says they have stories, I believe them.
      - nkozyra 1y ago
        It would not be worth a try if not for a very legitimate reason. Being laid off and mounting a civil case against deep pockets doesn't sound like a recipe for success.
      - lesuorac 1y ago
        Which is why severance payments in fang are tied to not suing the company. If that works when you lay of 10% of the company why doesn't it work when you want to fire 1 individual? You can definitely argue it's not fair to pay somebody extra for not doing a job but the alternative seems to be you keep paying them even more to keep not doing a job (and possibly doing negative work). Rather than put somebody on a pip for x months just offer them x months of salary to quit. Same money, same work done.
        zdragnar 1y ago
        You don't give people severance when you fire them, you only give them severance when you lay them off. There's a legal distinction which impacts whether or not the employee is eligible for unemployment benefits, among other things.
        lesuorac 1y ago
        Then layoff a singular individual with severance instead of firing them lol... (although legally "firing" vs "layoff" is irrelevant, depending on the situation you can get benefits despite being what a layperson considered quitting [1]). [1]: https://www.darwingray.com/from-desk-to-departure-when-moving-an-employees-desk-could-lead-to-an-unfair-dismissal-claim/ https://www.darwingray.com/from-desk-to-departure-when-movin...
  - fifticon 1y ago
    but who takes responsiblility for hiring those 'bad' people in the first place.. I am not saying you should't get rid of them, but the issue makes me think of that kind of people, who for some reason always think that it is someone other than themselves who must adjust and adapt.
    - glimshe 1y ago
      Those who overhired should have been fired, I agree. It's incredible (or not) that the CEOs weren't eliminated.
    - grogenaut 1y ago
      The people who hired them may be long gone by now.
    - Aurornis 1y ago
      Can't speak for every company, but most companies I've worked for with detailed hiring practices would evaluate the long-term outcomes of people that hiring managers chose. If someone hired a lot of people who had to be laid off later, they would get more supervision and review of future hires.
  - reactordev 1y ago
    >But you wouldn't believe how many bad people were in big tech because of the COVID over hiring. There’s no correlation. They hired expecting a certain type of growth. They fired because of AI. The narrative that they were getting rid of bad workers was their excuse, not the reason. Many great engineers got let go. Many project managers that had been with the company through ups and downs. One guy was let go after being poached from a FAANG after his 3rd day. So don’t say anyone deserved it.
    - ahtihn 1y ago
      Post-covid layoffs happened before ChatGPT, so it's certainly not because of AI. End of 0 interest rates is the more likely reason.
  - jayd16 1y ago
    So like, what's the argument here? You felt FAANGs over hired and then had a good round of layoffs so every layoff is good and justified?
    - Nimitz14 1y ago
      There's still too much fat, or rather people who just add net negative value. My org would benefit from firing easily 50%.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
  - tharmas 1y ago
    I heard that the purpose of over hiring during Covid was to hoard talent. That is, to prevent another company from hiring that talent.
- bko 1y ago
  I don't think you need to "justify layoffs". If a company feels an employee is not being productive, they should be allowed to let them go. Same way if an employee feels he is getting underpaid or wants to work somewhere else, they should be allowed to leave. I've actually always liked working for companies in which the objective was straight forward. None of this "we're a family" stuff. You should be kind, and all the places I was at were kind. But layoffs are a reality and reducing headcount at times is part of that. You need a way to get rid of dead wood, otherwise you would be too afraid to grow and hire when you need to.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    > I don't think you need to "justify layoffs". Layoffs are a signal to markets of struggles, and firms absolutely do, in practice, need to justify them (and their scale and focus) to avoid the risk of a self-fulfilling market perception that they signal a problems that they do not fully resolve. (If there is already a problem narrative, much of the justification is obvious, and the firm just needs to cover explaining how the layoffs address the problem.)
    - helge9210 1y ago
      If we assume the company runs N projects with positive Net Present Value (NPV) at the start of the project and after re-evaluation some of the project NPV turned to be negative, closing the project and laying off the staff will actually make company worth more.
      - dragonwriter 1y ago
        Yes, but the reason you will see companies put out press releases explaining layoffs is because the market does not on its own make such generous assumptions reliably when it sees layoffs. (And even if it does, the fact that the NPV of a project "turned negative" indicates that the value of the company dropped, and the layoffs are only a partial mitigation, which still hurts the perception of the company if the market hadn't discovered and priced in the drop before the company did and reacted with layoffs.)
- jayd16 1y ago
  Games are a deep pipeline. Technically they would be looking at cost and revenue projections 3-5 years out, not this year or last year. That said, I think its completely justified for union bargaining to push back on the idea that its the emplpoyees that should burden that problem.
- leetharris 1y ago
  This is the nature of public markets. Not everything should be public. In fact, MOST things should not be public. Because being public forces accountability and liability to shareholders in a way that is completely unlike being private. A company can be successful by most metrics, but if certain trends are not heading in the right direction, then faith in the stock drops, employee compensation goes down, future investments become dicey, etc. This is the nature of public companies. This is why they don't want to be public anymore.
- Eric_WVGG 1y ago
  EA is about as successful as it is possible for a videogame company to get. There's a finite number of gamers, hours in the day, and cash that those gamers can spend, and EA is getting a healthy chunk of it. If the point of a corporation is profitability and good product, they had that. But if the point is growth, then all that leaves is branching into other verticals, which leaves… movies and gambling? loving that late stage capitalism!
- screye 1y ago
  > as an excuse to justify layoffs and other activities that transfer wealth and power from employees to management and shareholders Video game employees (programmers) are famously overworked, layoff prone and have little say in executive matters. I can't imagine how PE could make things worse. The video game industry has been in an odd place for a while. The 2020s haven't produced many reliable AAA hits.
- manoDev 1y ago
  Salaried workers sell their time in advance with promises of promotions, bonuses or stock in the future. So what (public) companies do is over hire during growth, then lay off later to transfer the value created by these workers to shareholders. Rinse, repeat.
- yunyu 1y ago
  As a shareholder of many companies, I would be disappointed if the management team made decisions that disproportionately benefited employees at the expense of other non-employee shareholders.
  - RobotCaleb 1y ago
    Yeah, because you as the shareholder are worth more to the company and society than the people at the company.
    - yunyu 1y ago
      The goal of most companies is to maximize returns to shareholders, not society or employees. If it wasn't that I wouldn't have invested.
      - RobotCaleb 1y ago
        I'm not saying that you're wrong, just implying that it's not right.
      - bcrosby95 1y ago
        It's part of the social contract. Corps and limited liability don't have to exist - they aren't some natural thing, they are something we made up because its useful to society. Once it stops being useful we can axe them.
    - terminalshort 1y ago
      Considering he paid to be a shareholder, and the company is paying the employees to be there, that makes sense.
  - andrepd 1y ago
    Which is why—to invoke a cliché—the problem is the system, not individual people doing what benefits them inside the system.
- ActionHank 1y ago
  Won't somebody please think of the executives?
- gigatexal 1y ago
  because investors think things can and must go up and to the right and at ever faster rates or the public stock price will fall. this idea is silly and unsustainable if you think about it just for 2 seconds.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Actually-healthy companies cosplaying as struggling companies, as an excuse to justify layoffs This is a negotiation. You’re seeing one side message. The union didn’t have a say in whether EA got acquired. But it does have the ability to make it a mess. Part of that ability is in public messaging. So you’d expect to see , if the union is savvy, public grandstanding and threats paired with private negotiations for better terms for union members, whether that be immunity from lay-offs or some other wins.
  - echelon 1y ago
    I don't know where to attach this comment. This isn't about PE juicing the company and doing layoffs. This is about transplanting and nurturing a lucrative industry into a former Petro state. This is sowing the seeds of a prosperous, post-oil world. It's an investment in the future as the world is changing. This will look more like Lenovo and Thinkpad North Carolina than a PE shake down and gutting. The jobs will not evaporate, but they will absolutely start cross-training engineers in the Middle East and building up new talent there.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > jobs will not evaporate, but they will absolutely start cross-training engineers in the Middle East and building up new talent there If this is what the union fears, this is the moment to negotiate safeguards.
- underlipton 1y ago
  Conspiracy theory: they are vulnerable. Almost everyone is, because almost everyone is party to the credit/money-printing grift that has kept markets from collapsing since (depending on your perspective) 2015/2019/2022. Especially the big, "healthy" companies. They're going private because it would allow them to mask their losses in a coming recession.
doctorpangloss 1y ago
Games are experiences, all aspects of the experience, such as how the game is made and by whom, is on the table (is “valid”). That said, the best way to achieve the goals of the article at a studio like EA is make it an issue for the games’ primary audience, 13 year old boys. The way that comments like these get downvoted shows why these developer union guys, whom I support, have so far to go.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
lofaszvanitt 1y ago
"EA is one of the largest video game developers and publishers in the world." Yet, it creates zero value. As an added plus EA is a publicly traded company....
- jsbg 1y ago
  > Yet, it creates zero value. Then why do people give them money?
  - dgfitz 1y ago
    Yeah, it’s like saying Netflix doesn’t create value, or Universal Pictures doesn’t create value. I do not agree with the GP. As far as I can tell, openAI has created very, very negative value as of today, financially.
  - dunkvg 1y ago
    What he meant is that company's MO is buying IPs of successful franchises that are dear to many gamers, release 1-2 crappy games on that IP that is filled to the brim with microtransactions which is not well received by the customers (but makes them money), resulting in the death of that franchise. Rinse and repeat for whatever IPs still remain to be bought. It creates money, but contributes 0 or negative value for the actual gaming industry, unlike other companies like FromSoft that consistently hits the ball out of the park, pushing the envelope on new franchises and new gaming genres. THAT, is creating value.
    - gruez 1y ago
      >which is not well received by the customers (but makes them money), stated preference vs revealed preference, or alternately, the people commenting about games on HN or reddit aren't reflective of the average EA customer.
      - ceejayoz 1y ago
        That a heroin addict's "stated preference" is to quit does not mean they secretly want to be a drug addict when their "revealed preference" for something deeply addictive comes around.
gurumeditations 1y ago
[flagged]
jjangkke 1y ago
i think the union here is overreaching and expectations are unrealistic. the stakeholders/investors have priority here and they have sold the company to the highest bidder. at this point anyone participating or showing support behind union is at risk of being profiled and black listed in the industry and not just EA. its in their collective interest to setup in jurisdictions outside the US where labor laws make the latter illegal but certainly not in many parts of the world and jurisdiction arbitrage makes it a very real probability. my advice to anyone working at EA or any unionized white collar jobs in this nidustry and relate to keep your heads down and don't post your thoughts in public.
- jayd16 1y ago
  If pushing back against a cash out is overreaching then what would be a valid union power?
  - wahnfrieden 1y ago
    OP is anti-union, so, likely nothing. Their points are cause for unions to organize across companies and industries (though solidarity strike action is illegal in the US because it's effective). But they take for granted that employers should have their way and that employee interests are best served by appeasing owners.
- fidotron 1y ago
  > the stakeholders/investors have priority here and they have sold the company to the highest bidder. At EA a lot of the long term employees had significant stock holdings too.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    How significant? 5% of the company each? 20% of the company together? If you just mean they got a few hundred thousand dollars out of the sale, that's not "significant" at the company level. Significant stock ownership means you have a real say in the company's direction.
- 1y ago
next_xibalba 1y ago
All I ever hear about it how hellish it is to work in the video game industry. Why do people stay? How do companies retain employees?
- thrance 1y ago
  It is hellish because there are a lot of people who want to work in video games. Workers having to compete lead to bad working conditions, as employers push the boundaries of what they can get away with while still finding enough workers to fill their positions.
  - nonethewiser 1y ago
    For sure. Which is why it's weird that someone would stay and expect things to improve. As we've made abundantly clear, the willingness to stay is precisely why the conditions are bad.
- gruez 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential Making video games is a cool job. Making enterprise CRUD software isn't. Video game studios can therefore treat workers worse and get away with it because for at least some subset of the workforce, they'll put up with it.
- doctorpangloss 1y ago
  the industry is vast and there are many experiences. It's certainly not hellish for the 3 guys + contractors who made Silksong, or for Lucas Pope, or for many of the people working at huge mobile game studios. EA makes games with numbers in their names. They do not take on a lot of risk, which means "anyone" could do it. So they have to work very, very hard. This is NOT a complicated idea.
- gdulli 1y ago
  I had good experiences, but that's not fodder for loud vanity blogging so the world doesn't hear about it.
- 1y ago
nonethewiser 1y ago
Video game unions are such an interesting case because the worker is very skilled and the skills are highly transferable. This isn't a situation where you only know how to mill steel and there is only 1 steel mill around. You can stay and fight to unionize or you could just go get a better job right now. The fact that people stay speaks to how passionate they are about the industry, but also how willing they are to settle for less.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 1y ago
  The industry is not in a state where you can just go and get a better job right now. We’ve had three years of relentless layoffs and studio closures, worse than at any other time in history. There’s nowhere to go and US employers in games are disappearing by the day.
  - dlock17 1y ago
    They're suggesting the video game workers get a better job outside of the video game industry, as their talents would be better compensated elsewhere. I agree as this is the main reason why I do not work in the video game industry. I would love to work in it like many others but seeing friends get chewed up and spat out has dissuaded me over time.
  - nmeofthestate 1y ago
    > There’s nowhere to go and US employers in games are disappearing by the day. It's an apocalyptic picture that's rather at odds with the unions claim that EA is doing fantastically.
    - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 1y ago
      There are a few employers who have effectively guaranteed revenue in perpetuity through what's known as "forever games". EA's sports division prints money. Valve prints money. Call of Duty prints money. Valorant/League print money. Fortnite prints money. Roblox prints money. Their products have been around for 10-20+ years and will seemingly never die. But that's not representative of the industry as a whole, and is not representative for the average game dev. See https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025 https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025 and others. The other bit to notice about EA in particular is that its share price has been flat for the last 7 years, they've continuously failed to figure out how to change that, which is a problem. Selling and layoffs are a lever to get out of that hole, although it remains to be seen how great of a move it turns out to be.
jmyeet 1y ago
Private equity is cancer. It should be illegal. It adds nothing of value and just hollows out a company for short term profit-taking while hoping nobody notices how your restructure is laden with exploding debt. This will kill EA, period. IIRC I read the other day there are more private equity firms in the US than McDonald's now. We produce nothing but weapons now as well as financial chicanery like private equity.
- BeetleB 1y ago
  > Private equity is cancer. It should be illegal. It adds nothing of value and just hollows out a company for short term profit-taking while hoping nobody notices how your restructure is laden with exploding debt. I would recommend listening to the How I Built This podcast. A number of interviews are with people whose companies were acquired by private equity. You can hear the founders' perspectives on private equity. It often doesn't match what you say. And I think in most cases, the brand is still around and doing well.
tasuki 1y ago
> EA employees and the Communications Workers of America union have issued a statement against the proposed private acquisition of the company, claiming they were not represented in the negotiations and any jobs lost as a result would "be a choice, not a necessity, made to pad investors' pockets". Are the employees claiming the company will be more profitable without them? What a disingenuous thing to put forward! I'd have expected the employees to claim that letting them go will tank the value of the company.
- tasuki 1y ago
  > We are calling on regulators and elected officials to scrutinise this deal and ensure that any path forward protects jobs, preserves creative freedom, and keeps decision-making accountable to the workers who make EA successful. If it's the workers that make EA successful, the investors would be stupid to let them go! Not only do they lose these great workers who make the company successful, also they potentially get new competition from them. > As such, workers have launched a petition in a "fight to make video games better for workers and players - not billionaires". Afaik the AAA games that EA makes are already plenty bad for the players... > Effectively, Saudi Arabia's vast fossil fuel-derived state wealth is controlled by one person, which isn't good for human rights, or business either. Finally something I can agree with in the whole article...
chews 1y ago
FTC tried, Trump won, Kushner raised from the House of Saud and the rest is history.
siliconc0w 1y ago
It really doesn't seem like you should be able to buy a company with debt then transfer the debt to the company to now pay off while also paying yourself hefty management fees and carry. Basically everything is now owned by PE due to this effective unpatched vulnerability in our finance system.
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  One would think the financial sector would be wary of infinite money glitches, but apparently everyone is onboard with this one
  - bcrosby95 1y ago
    The financial sector companies involved are first in line if it goes bad. They don't care if the company survives as long as it has enough assets to sell off to get paid.
    - nickff 1y ago
      The company would have to be severely undervalued (or perhaps perceived to be severely mismanaged) for this to be the case, which seems strange to me. Then again, the typical PE strategies (loading the company with debt and cutting investments in future products & services) also seem like very bad business strategies. I really don't understand why anyone would loan money for a buyout, or buy a (share of the) company which had recently been through it.
  - nickff 1y ago
    Leveraged buy-outs (LBOs) must be profitable for the investors backing them (or else I'm sure they wouldn't), but I agree that it is very strange, and I really don't understand how this could be the case.
    - s1artibartfast 1y ago
      I dont understand why people are so confused and skeptical about this. Its basically like a mortgage. Buy a house and use it as collateral for the loan
ericksoa 1y ago
Sometimes layoffs are designed to give air cover for execs that want to get rid of "networks of detractors" who are causing problems, like how in a game company there might be a network of influential luddites who oppose use of LLMs over ideological reasons, even if the use case is good. IMO those are virtuous layoffs, sometimes you need to clear your company culture of troublemakers who are getting in the way of company strategy.
- antonymoose 1y ago
  I suppose there are firms large enough to make that work. Having worked at a smaller firm with 15 SWEs that employed this strategy, they lost their 3 critics and proceeded to lose another 8, myself included, due to loss of confidence in leadership in the immediate (3-6 months) of the initial culling. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton.
  - culll_kuprey 1y ago
    That’s cool, they can just hire Indians to put out a shittier version.
beanjuiceII 1y ago
laughable, they need to clean house big time
Razengan 1y ago
I wonder if their FPS games will be used to train real life killbots

321 points by ksec 1y ago

> "EA is not a struggling company," the statement reads. "With annual revenues reaching $7.5 billion and $1 billion in profit each year, EA is one of the largest video game developers and publishers in the world." Seems to be a common theme in 2025: Actually-healthy companies cosplaying as struggling companies, as an excuse to justify layoffs and other activities that transfer wealth and power from employees to management and shareholders. Like, does anyone think any of these BigTech (and MediumTech) companies who are all doing layoffs are really "struggling" and "vulnerable"? It's always just an unbelievable excuse.

glimshe 1y ago
This is multifaceted question. I agree with what you're saying, but let me add something. Corporations are greedy and let go of many good people. But they also let go of many people who deserved to go. It's really hard to get rid of bad people, even in the US. But you wouldn't believe how many bad people were in big tech because of the COVID over hiring. I've seen dozens, if not hundreds of people, who went to FAANG and added next to no value. As a manager in one of these companies, I had to deal with a mix of great people and many who were absolutely taking advantage of the company. I could write a book about it. Good for them, but it's not surprising that the party would end someday.
- eli_gottlieb 1y ago
  > It's really hard to get rid of bad people, even in the US. Could you explain why it's hard? I've never seen anyone run into any kind of difficulty letting go an at-will employee. The manager can do so at any time, for any reason or no reason at all.
  - mikestew 1y ago
    And the company can be sued at any time, for any reason or no reason at all. That does not mean the plaintiff will win, but against deep enough pockets, it can be worth a try. PIPs take time, and HR isn’t about to let you skip them, and bad employees know they’ve got six months to spend their workday looking for a new job while not doing their current job. I’ve worked at those companies, and sometimes managed at same, and when OP says they have stories, I believe them.
    - nkozyra 1y ago
      It would not be worth a try if not for a very legitimate reason. Being laid off and mounting a civil case against deep pockets doesn't sound like a recipe for success.
    - lesuorac 1y ago
      Which is why severance payments in fang are tied to not suing the company. If that works when you lay of 10% of the company why doesn't it work when you want to fire 1 individual? You can definitely argue it's not fair to pay somebody extra for not doing a job but the alternative seems to be you keep paying them even more to keep not doing a job (and possibly doing negative work). Rather than put somebody on a pip for x months just offer them x months of salary to quit. Same money, same work done.
      - zdragnar 1y ago
        You don't give people severance when you fire them, you only give them severance when you lay them off. There's a legal distinction which impacts whether or not the employee is eligible for unemployment benefits, among other things.
        lesuorac 1y ago
        Then layoff a singular individual with severance instead of firing them lol... (although legally "firing" vs "layoff" is irrelevant, depending on the situation you can get benefits despite being what a layperson considered quitting [1]). [1]: https://www.darwingray.com/from-desk-to-departure-when-moving-an-employees-desk-could-lead-to-an-unfair-dismissal-claim/ https://www.darwingray.com/from-desk-to-departure-when-movin...
- fifticon 1y ago
  but who takes responsiblility for hiring those 'bad' people in the first place.. I am not saying you should't get rid of them, but the issue makes me think of that kind of people, who for some reason always think that it is someone other than themselves who must adjust and adapt.
  - glimshe 1y ago
    Those who overhired should have been fired, I agree. It's incredible (or not) that the CEOs weren't eliminated.
  - grogenaut 1y ago
    The people who hired them may be long gone by now.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    Can't speak for every company, but most companies I've worked for with detailed hiring practices would evaluate the long-term outcomes of people that hiring managers chose. If someone hired a lot of people who had to be laid off later, they would get more supervision and review of future hires.
- reactordev 1y ago
  >But you wouldn't believe how many bad people were in big tech because of the COVID over hiring. There’s no correlation. They hired expecting a certain type of growth. They fired because of AI. The narrative that they were getting rid of bad workers was their excuse, not the reason. Many great engineers got let go. Many project managers that had been with the company through ups and downs. One guy was let go after being poached from a FAANG after his 3rd day. So don’t say anyone deserved it.
  - ahtihn 1y ago
    Post-covid layoffs happened before ChatGPT, so it's certainly not because of AI. End of 0 interest rates is the more likely reason.
- jayd16 1y ago
  So like, what's the argument here? You felt FAANGs over hired and then had a good round of layoffs so every layoff is good and justified?
  - Nimitz14 1y ago
    There's still too much fat, or rather people who just add net negative value. My org would benefit from firing easily 50%.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- tharmas 1y ago
  I heard that the purpose of over hiring during Covid was to hoard talent. That is, to prevent another company from hiring that talent.
bko 1y ago
I don't think you need to "justify layoffs". If a company feels an employee is not being productive, they should be allowed to let them go. Same way if an employee feels he is getting underpaid or wants to work somewhere else, they should be allowed to leave. I've actually always liked working for companies in which the objective was straight forward. None of this "we're a family" stuff. You should be kind, and all the places I was at were kind. But layoffs are a reality and reducing headcount at times is part of that. You need a way to get rid of dead wood, otherwise you would be too afraid to grow and hire when you need to.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > I don't think you need to "justify layoffs". Layoffs are a signal to markets of struggles, and firms absolutely do, in practice, need to justify them (and their scale and focus) to avoid the risk of a self-fulfilling market perception that they signal a problems that they do not fully resolve. (If there is already a problem narrative, much of the justification is obvious, and the firm just needs to cover explaining how the layoffs address the problem.)
  - helge9210 1y ago
    If we assume the company runs N projects with positive Net Present Value (NPV) at the start of the project and after re-evaluation some of the project NPV turned to be negative, closing the project and laying off the staff will actually make company worth more.
    - dragonwriter 1y ago
      Yes, but the reason you will see companies put out press releases explaining layoffs is because the market does not on its own make such generous assumptions reliably when it sees layoffs. (And even if it does, the fact that the NPV of a project "turned negative" indicates that the value of the company dropped, and the layoffs are only a partial mitigation, which still hurts the perception of the company if the market hadn't discovered and priced in the drop before the company did and reacted with layoffs.)
jayd16 1y ago
Games are a deep pipeline. Technically they would be looking at cost and revenue projections 3-5 years out, not this year or last year. That said, I think its completely justified for union bargaining to push back on the idea that its the emplpoyees that should burden that problem.
leetharris 1y ago
This is the nature of public markets. Not everything should be public. In fact, MOST things should not be public. Because being public forces accountability and liability to shareholders in a way that is completely unlike being private. A company can be successful by most metrics, but if certain trends are not heading in the right direction, then faith in the stock drops, employee compensation goes down, future investments become dicey, etc. This is the nature of public companies. This is why they don't want to be public anymore.
Eric_WVGG 1y ago
EA is about as successful as it is possible for a videogame company to get. There's a finite number of gamers, hours in the day, and cash that those gamers can spend, and EA is getting a healthy chunk of it. If the point of a corporation is profitability and good product, they had that. But if the point is growth, then all that leaves is branching into other verticals, which leaves… movies and gambling? loving that late stage capitalism!
screye 1y ago
> as an excuse to justify layoffs and other activities that transfer wealth and power from employees to management and shareholders Video game employees (programmers) are famously overworked, layoff prone and have little say in executive matters. I can't imagine how PE could make things worse. The video game industry has been in an odd place for a while. The 2020s haven't produced many reliable AAA hits.
manoDev 1y ago
Salaried workers sell their time in advance with promises of promotions, bonuses or stock in the future. So what (public) companies do is over hire during growth, then lay off later to transfer the value created by these workers to shareholders. Rinse, repeat.
yunyu 1y ago
As a shareholder of many companies, I would be disappointed if the management team made decisions that disproportionately benefited employees at the expense of other non-employee shareholders.
- RobotCaleb 1y ago
  Yeah, because you as the shareholder are worth more to the company and society than the people at the company.
  - yunyu 1y ago
    The goal of most companies is to maximize returns to shareholders, not society or employees. If it wasn't that I wouldn't have invested.
    - RobotCaleb 1y ago
      I'm not saying that you're wrong, just implying that it's not right.
    - bcrosby95 1y ago
      It's part of the social contract. Corps and limited liability don't have to exist - they aren't some natural thing, they are something we made up because its useful to society. Once it stops being useful we can axe them.
  - terminalshort 1y ago
    Considering he paid to be a shareholder, and the company is paying the employees to be there, that makes sense.
- andrepd 1y ago
  Which is why—to invoke a cliché—the problem is the system, not individual people doing what benefits them inside the system.
ActionHank 1y ago
Won't somebody please think of the executives?
gigatexal 1y ago
because investors think things can and must go up and to the right and at ever faster rates or the public stock price will fall. this idea is silly and unsustainable if you think about it just for 2 seconds.
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> Actually-healthy companies cosplaying as struggling companies, as an excuse to justify layoffs This is a negotiation. You’re seeing one side message. The union didn’t have a say in whether EA got acquired. But it does have the ability to make it a mess. Part of that ability is in public messaging. So you’d expect to see , if the union is savvy, public grandstanding and threats paired with private negotiations for better terms for union members, whether that be immunity from lay-offs or some other wins.
- echelon 1y ago
  I don't know where to attach this comment. This isn't about PE juicing the company and doing layoffs. This is about transplanting and nurturing a lucrative industry into a former Petro state. This is sowing the seeds of a prosperous, post-oil world. It's an investment in the future as the world is changing. This will look more like Lenovo and Thinkpad North Carolina than a PE shake down and gutting. The jobs will not evaporate, but they will absolutely start cross-training engineers in the Middle East and building up new talent there.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > jobs will not evaporate, but they will absolutely start cross-training engineers in the Middle East and building up new talent there If this is what the union fears, this is the moment to negotiate safeguards.
underlipton 1y ago
Conspiracy theory: they are vulnerable. Almost everyone is, because almost everyone is party to the credit/money-printing grift that has kept markets from collapsing since (depending on your perspective) 2015/2019/2022. Especially the big, "healthy" companies. They're going private because it would allow them to mask their losses in a coming recession.

doctorpangloss 1y ago

Games are experiences, all aspects of the experience, such as how the game is made and by whom, is on the table (is “valid”). That said, the best way to achieve the goals of the article at a studio like EA is make it an issue for the games’ primary audience, 13 year old boys. The way that comments like these get downvoted shows why these developer union guys, whom I support, have so far to go.

deleted 1y ago
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lofaszvanitt 1y ago

"EA is one of the largest video game developers and publishers in the world." Yet, it creates zero value. As an added plus EA is a publicly traded company....

jsbg 1y ago
> Yet, it creates zero value. Then why do people give them money?
- dgfitz 1y ago
  Yeah, it’s like saying Netflix doesn’t create value, or Universal Pictures doesn’t create value. I do not agree with the GP. As far as I can tell, openAI has created very, very negative value as of today, financially.
- dunkvg 1y ago
  What he meant is that company's MO is buying IPs of successful franchises that are dear to many gamers, release 1-2 crappy games on that IP that is filled to the brim with microtransactions which is not well received by the customers (but makes them money), resulting in the death of that franchise. Rinse and repeat for whatever IPs still remain to be bought. It creates money, but contributes 0 or negative value for the actual gaming industry, unlike other companies like FromSoft that consistently hits the ball out of the park, pushing the envelope on new franchises and new gaming genres. THAT, is creating value.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >which is not well received by the customers (but makes them money), stated preference vs revealed preference, or alternately, the people commenting about games on HN or reddit aren't reflective of the average EA customer.
    - ceejayoz 1y ago
      That a heroin addict's "stated preference" is to quit does not mean they secretly want to be a drug addict when their "revealed preference" for something deeply addictive comes around.

gurumeditations 1y ago

[flagged]

jjangkke 1y ago

i think the union here is overreaching and expectations are unrealistic. the stakeholders/investors have priority here and they have sold the company to the highest bidder. at this point anyone participating or showing support behind union is at risk of being profiled and black listed in the industry and not just EA. its in their collective interest to setup in jurisdictions outside the US where labor laws make the latter illegal but certainly not in many parts of the world and jurisdiction arbitrage makes it a very real probability. my advice to anyone working at EA or any unionized white collar jobs in this nidustry and relate to keep your heads down and don't post your thoughts in public.

jayd16 1y ago
If pushing back against a cash out is overreaching then what would be a valid union power?
- wahnfrieden 1y ago
  OP is anti-union, so, likely nothing. Their points are cause for unions to organize across companies and industries (though solidarity strike action is illegal in the US because it's effective). But they take for granted that employers should have their way and that employee interests are best served by appeasing owners.
fidotron 1y ago
> the stakeholders/investors have priority here and they have sold the company to the highest bidder. At EA a lot of the long term employees had significant stock holdings too.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  How significant? 5% of the company each? 20% of the company together? If you just mean they got a few hundred thousand dollars out of the sale, that's not "significant" at the company level. Significant stock ownership means you have a real say in the company's direction.
1y ago

next_xibalba 1y ago

All I ever hear about it how hellish it is to work in the video game industry. Why do people stay? How do companies retain employees?

thrance 1y ago
It is hellish because there are a lot of people who want to work in video games. Workers having to compete lead to bad working conditions, as employers push the boundaries of what they can get away with while still finding enough workers to fill their positions.
- nonethewiser 1y ago
  For sure. Which is why it's weird that someone would stay and expect things to improve. As we've made abundantly clear, the willingness to stay is precisely why the conditions are bad.
gruez 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential Making video games is a cool job. Making enterprise CRUD software isn't. Video game studios can therefore treat workers worse and get away with it because for at least some subset of the workforce, they'll put up with it.
doctorpangloss 1y ago
the industry is vast and there are many experiences. It's certainly not hellish for the 3 guys + contractors who made Silksong, or for Lucas Pope, or for many of the people working at huge mobile game studios. EA makes games with numbers in their names. They do not take on a lot of risk, which means "anyone" could do it. So they have to work very, very hard. This is NOT a complicated idea.
gdulli 1y ago
I had good experiences, but that's not fodder for loud vanity blogging so the world doesn't hear about it.
1y ago

nonethewiser 1y ago

Video game unions are such an interesting case because the worker is very skilled and the skills are highly transferable. This isn't a situation where you only know how to mill steel and there is only 1 steel mill around. You can stay and fight to unionize or you could just go get a better job right now. The fact that people stay speaks to how passionate they are about the industry, but also how willing they are to settle for less.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 1y ago
The industry is not in a state where you can just go and get a better job right now. We’ve had three years of relentless layoffs and studio closures, worse than at any other time in history. There’s nowhere to go and US employers in games are disappearing by the day.
- dlock17 1y ago
  They're suggesting the video game workers get a better job outside of the video game industry, as their talents would be better compensated elsewhere. I agree as this is the main reason why I do not work in the video game industry. I would love to work in it like many others but seeing friends get chewed up and spat out has dissuaded me over time.
- nmeofthestate 1y ago
  > There’s nowhere to go and US employers in games are disappearing by the day. It's an apocalyptic picture that's rather at odds with the unions claim that EA is doing fantastically.
  - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 1y ago
    There are a few employers who have effectively guaranteed revenue in perpetuity through what's known as "forever games". EA's sports division prints money. Valve prints money. Call of Duty prints money. Valorant/League print money. Fortnite prints money. Roblox prints money. Their products have been around for 10-20+ years and will seemingly never die. But that's not representative of the industry as a whole, and is not representative for the average game dev. See https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025 https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025 and others. The other bit to notice about EA in particular is that its share price has been flat for the last 7 years, they've continuously failed to figure out how to change that, which is a problem. Selling and layoffs are a lever to get out of that hole, although it remains to be seen how great of a move it turns out to be.

jmyeet 1y ago

Private equity is cancer. It should be illegal. It adds nothing of value and just hollows out a company for short term profit-taking while hoping nobody notices how your restructure is laden with exploding debt. This will kill EA, period. IIRC I read the other day there are more private equity firms in the US than McDonald's now. We produce nothing but weapons now as well as financial chicanery like private equity.

BeetleB 1y ago
> Private equity is cancer. It should be illegal. It adds nothing of value and just hollows out a company for short term profit-taking while hoping nobody notices how your restructure is laden with exploding debt. I would recommend listening to the How I Built This podcast. A number of interviews are with people whose companies were acquired by private equity. You can hear the founders' perspectives on private equity. It often doesn't match what you say. And I think in most cases, the brand is still around and doing well.

tasuki 1y ago

> EA employees and the Communications Workers of America union have issued a statement against the proposed private acquisition of the company, claiming they were not represented in the negotiations and any jobs lost as a result would "be a choice, not a necessity, made to pad investors' pockets". Are the employees claiming the company will be more profitable without them? What a disingenuous thing to put forward! I'd have expected the employees to claim that letting them go will tank the value of the company.

tasuki 1y ago
> We are calling on regulators and elected officials to scrutinise this deal and ensure that any path forward protects jobs, preserves creative freedom, and keeps decision-making accountable to the workers who make EA successful. If it's the workers that make EA successful, the investors would be stupid to let them go! Not only do they lose these great workers who make the company successful, also they potentially get new competition from them. > As such, workers have launched a petition in a "fight to make video games better for workers and players - not billionaires". Afaik the AAA games that EA makes are already plenty bad for the players... > Effectively, Saudi Arabia's vast fossil fuel-derived state wealth is controlled by one person, which isn't good for human rights, or business either. Finally something I can agree with in the whole article...

chews 1y ago

FTC tried, Trump won, Kushner raised from the House of Saud and the rest is history.

siliconc0w 1y ago

It really doesn't seem like you should be able to buy a company with debt then transfer the debt to the company to now pay off while also paying yourself hefty management fees and carry. Basically everything is now owned by PE due to this effective unpatched vulnerability in our finance system.

swiftcoder 1y ago
One would think the financial sector would be wary of infinite money glitches, but apparently everyone is onboard with this one
- bcrosby95 1y ago
  The financial sector companies involved are first in line if it goes bad. They don't care if the company survives as long as it has enough assets to sell off to get paid.
  - nickff 1y ago
    The company would have to be severely undervalued (or perhaps perceived to be severely mismanaged) for this to be the case, which seems strange to me. Then again, the typical PE strategies (loading the company with debt and cutting investments in future products & services) also seem like very bad business strategies. I really don't understand why anyone would loan money for a buyout, or buy a (share of the) company which had recently been through it.
- nickff 1y ago
  Leveraged buy-outs (LBOs) must be profitable for the investors backing them (or else I'm sure they wouldn't), but I agree that it is very strange, and I really don't understand how this could be the case.
  - s1artibartfast 1y ago
    I dont understand why people are so confused and skeptical about this. Its basically like a mortgage. Buy a house and use it as collateral for the loan

ericksoa 1y ago

Sometimes layoffs are designed to give air cover for execs that want to get rid of "networks of detractors" who are causing problems, like how in a game company there might be a network of influential luddites who oppose use of LLMs over ideological reasons, even if the use case is good. IMO those are virtuous layoffs, sometimes you need to clear your company culture of troublemakers who are getting in the way of company strategy.

antonymoose 1y ago
I suppose there are firms large enough to make that work. Having worked at a smaller firm with 15 SWEs that employed this strategy, they lost their 3 critics and proceeded to lose another 8, myself included, due to loss of confidence in leadership in the immediate (3-6 months) of the initial culling. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton.
- culll_kuprey 1y ago
  That’s cool, they can just hire Indians to put out a shittier version.

beanjuiceII 1y ago

laughable, they need to clean house big time

Razengan 1y ago

I wonder if their FPS games will be used to train real life killbots