It’s never enough.Respawn was hit with a round of layoffslast week that impacted 100 developers across a handful of different projects. In addition to the layoffs, EA canceled two incubation projects –one unannounced Star Wars first-person shooterand an unannounced Titanfall extraction shooter.
Every time news breaks that a studio has been hit with layoffs, I get frustrated. It’s depressing to hear that the people who put their hearts and souls into creating impactful art and entertainmentaren’t able to find stability while doing so. The Respawn layoffs, however, reinforce something sinister about the industry that we’ve known for a long time:
No matter how successful a studio is, no matter what it brings to the table, whether it makes critically acclaimed games or commercially successful ones or both, it will never be enough for corporate publishers.
What More Can You Ask?
Respawn Entertainment is an incredibly successful studio. It developedone of the most successful battle royales on the market with Apex Legends, created thewidely beloved Titanfall series, and helmed the Star Wars Jedi franchise –one of the most iconic Star Wars game series of all time. When thinking about what more a publisher could want from a studio, it’s tough to imagine what Respawn could do to add more value in their eyes.
EA has been laying off its teams left and right. In addition to the 100 developers from Respawn, 200 more were let go across EA’s various studios in this current round of layoffs. This is nothing new for EA, however, sinceBioWare announced layoffs in Januaryreportedly leaving the team with less than 100 people working on the next Mass Effect game, andnearly 700 workers were let go in March 2024.
When looking at the pattern here, there’s a very clear common denominator. EA seems unfit to manage its portfolio of studios successfully. Respawn is successful, it’s a renowned studio that’s made critical darlings like Titanfall 2 and live-service pillars likeApex Legends. What more can EA want? What could Respawn have done to avoid this? If the answer is nothing, then the studio cannot possibly be blamed. Instead, the blame lies solely on the shoulders of a publisher mismanaging itself into the ground.
The Line Must Go Up
It’s heartbreaking, but we’ve seen this story before.Xbox claimed that Hi-Fi Rush was successful“in all key measurements” and that it “couldn’t be happier with what the team at Tango Gameworks delivered” beforesuddenly closing the studio.We’ve seenplenty of games flop, resulting in studio closures and layoffs, but it feels like, in recent years, there have been an equal number of success stories followed up by the same results.
We all know what the problem is: It’s mismanaged expectations, mismanaged budgets, and the absolute fantasy of year-over-year growth in perpetuity. It’s not enough to simply be successful, studios need to cost less money while raking in more cash.
When thinking about the people at the top who make these decisions, I’m reminded of a tweet mocking exponential growth models that do not take context or industry patterns into account. “My 3-month-old son is now TWICE as big as when he was born,” it reads, “He’s on track to weigh 7.5 trillion pounds by age 10.”
