EA Baton Rouge employees denounce the unprofessional dismissal of 200 people. This would have happened during a conversation on Zoom.
According to independent sources (via Kotaku), over 200 testers have been fired from Electronic Arts’ Louisiana branch, working mostly on Apex Legends so far. The firing of the employees reportedly took place during an unannounced call on Zoom.
sudden termination
Unaware of the news ahead of them, study members were to be summoned at 8 a.m. for an unscheduled online meeting, which many of them joined from their private computers and phones. When completed, all would be out of work, with 60 days notice.
EA’s plan was to surprise not only former employees already in place, but also their immediate superiors. laid off employees they were only given the opportunity to collect their belongings from the office only under the supervision of building security and to receive severance pay, which in many cases turned out not to cover the entirety of the signed contract when taking office.
As recently as April 2022, EA Baton Rouge was still looking for new employees for tester positions. Source: Facebook
The Future of Study, Apex, and EE Clarification
EA’s Baton Rouge branch opened in 2008 and trained testers who were fired yesterday to take care of the ever-evolving Apex quality and other projects.
Anonymous members of the affected group suggest that the quality assurance they provided will be difficult for another team to obtain, which could have negative consequences for apex legends particular players.
EA did not directly address the details of the incident, but assured that we can always expect a consistent level of attention to detail from them:
“As part of our overall strategy, we are expanding the distribution of the Apex Legends test team and finalizing the test which focused on Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which affects the services provided by our third-party provider.
Our global team, which includes remote testers from across the United States, allows us to increase our weekly hours of game testing and optimization and reflects our commitment to better understand and serve our growing community around the world.
Despite this massive wave of layoffs, EA’s Baton Rouge won’t be shutting down just yet.
The whole unpleasant event may have been related to the recent shutdown of mobile projects related to Apex Legends and Battlefield and the cancellation of the single-player spin-off called Titanfall Legends.