EA Austin lays off customer service staff
Marie Dealessandri
Features Editor
Thursday 19th May 2022
Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts has reportedly laid off up to 100 employees at its Austin office.
While some redundancies have been confirmed by EA, the exact number remains to be clarified.
According to Kotaku, which had access to internal EA emails, affected departments include customer services, and particularly employees supporting FIFA 22's live operations.
Going forward, EA will reportedly outsource these tasks, Kotaku added.
In an internal email, VP of customer experience Joel Knutson said that the layoffs were happening "in order to reduce complexity and increase [the department's] efficiency, flexibility and scalability."
Knutson added that he would also be "proposing redundancy" at staff in similar jobs at EA Galway, which focuses on customer support for Europe.
An anonymous source talking to Kotaku also said that these redundancies come after "repeated complaints" from both EA Austin and Galway offices about annual salary increases being too low, giving the example of a $0.10 hourly rise.
This follows the announcement on May 10 that EA and FIFA would be ending their nearly 30-year-old partnership, with EA's hit football franchise rebranded to EA Sports FC.
However, an EA representative said that the potential layoffs had nothing to do with the change.
"The changes in our customer support function are not tied to any one gaming franchise, nor are they connected to our EA Sports FC announcement last week," the spokesperson said. "The customer support function supports a wide range of player questions pertaining to our gaming titles, technology, including Origin or our EA Play subscription service."
In what seems to be a separate statement, EA spokesperson Charlie
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