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Update: EA has declined to provide specific details on the layoffs at EA Hyderabad.
Tiffany Steckler from EA’s corporate communications team responded to our report with the following statement.
EA is sharpening its focus to provide games for new platforms and mobile. In some cases, this involves reducing team sizes as we evolve into a more efficient organisation."
These are difficult decisions to let go of good people who have made important contributions to EA, and whenever possible we retrain or relocate employees to new roles. Streamlining our operations will help ensure EA is bringing the best next-generation games to players around the world.”
Original Story:Several employees at EA’s Hyderabad studio have been laid off following yesterday’s news that the publisher was pulling the plug on some of its social games.
EA announced that it was shutting down Playfish, the social games company it acquired in 2009, along with several games developed by it, including The Sims Social, SimCity Social, and Pet Society. More details on those closures can be found at MCV UK.
EA isn’t completely pulling out of the social space, however, as games like Bejeweled Blitz will continue.
As a direct result of these closures, around 50 employees at EA Hyderabad were laid off yesterday, one of the studio’s employees posted on the NASSCOM Gaming Forum’s Facebook page.
It’s not clear how these developers were involved with EA’s social games, but we’ve contacted EA for official word on these layoffs, and we’ll be sure to update this story as we get more details.
Meanwhile, GI.biz is reporting that EA’s social efforts will now be carried out under PopCap, which incidentally was also downsized last year.
The EA layoffs come just a couple of months after Gameloft shut down its development operations in Hyderabad, laying off all 200 employees in the process.
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