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Last week’s layoffs at PopCap Vancouver and Seattle were part efficiency savings at EA, the president of EA Labels has said.
Speaking to Bloomberg, Frank Gibeau said that many operations at the Plants vs Zombies developer were already being performed by EA, such as legal and business affairs.
He added that the move also meant there would be a shift away from social and further towards mobile for the casual games studio.
“With PopCap what we found was there were some areas inside PopCap that were duplicate to what EA was doing, a lot of central resources, legal, business affairs, those types of things,” said Gibeau.
"So we accelerated the integration there. We also looked at pivoting a little bit harder toward mobile and away from social so we made some adjustments in the speed plan there.”
PopCap, which was bought by EA for $750m last July, was forced to lay off 50 employees last week after the developer revealed it had found it difficult to maintain high profitability across all of its studios.
The casual games developer is also considering closing down its entire Dublin studio, which appears to contradict Gibeau’s statements that the publisher was simply making efficiency savings in legal and business costs.
