Redundancies hit EA Playfish

EA has enacted layoffs at social game developer Playfish as it continues its company-wide restructuring, an internal source at the studio has told Develop.

The redundancies are said to have been made as far as a month ago, before EA announced publicly that it would be terminating the studio’s Facebook titles The Sims Social, SimCity Social and Pet Society.

Playfish CEO and co-founder Kristian Segerstrale also told Develop that last year Playfish had been split “into multiple EA mobile, Maxis and sports studios plus the core of global digital publishing”.

He refuted any suggestions that the company had closed down completely. He did however appear to suggest there had been layoffs by tweeting it was a sad day for Playfish, and that “EA’s loss is the London start-up community’s gain”.

The PlayStation Jobs Twitter account has also tweeted that Sony staff will be visiting Playfish’s London office tomorrow with Evolution Studios and its R&D and Business Information Systems branches to “talk to anyone at risk of redundancy”.

EA has previously refused to comment on the situation at the studio.

Yesterday EA announced that it was terminating Facebook titles The Sims Social, Pet Society and SimCity Social as of June 14th as it continues with its company-wide restructuring.

This is despite the fact that, according to AppData, The Sims Social still has more than five million MAUs, while Pet Society and SimCity Social have more than one million monthly users each.

In a statement on the closure of The Sims Social, EA said it had made the decision to close the title so it could reallocate development resources to other projects.

The news came after EA had made a number of layoffs at its Montreal and Ireland offices.