EA Says No Layoffs

Some of you may recall yesterday’s coverage of the potential layoffs at the noting game publisher Electronic Arts, but for those of you who missed out on that coverage here is an excerpt that will get you up to speed in no time at all:

“When it comes to cutting jobs one would think that there would be very few  jobs left to cut outside of the bare bones at most companies. After all when all you hear about are job cuts day in and day out, often to vital services to our society, you would not think that there were many jobs left that could be cut from the arts or entertainment. Well it looks like we all were wrong.

This time it is Electronic Arts, better know as EA that are getting ready to cut back on jobs. For those of you who are not gamers here is a look at how the company describes itself: “Electronic Arts Inc. is a leading global interactive entertainment software company. EA develops, publishes, and distributes interactive software worldwide for video game systems, personal computers, wireless devices and the Internet.”

According to sources close to the company EA is going to be getting rid of a serious amount of staff. For now the layoffs are all rumors, as the company has not made any official announcement about the cuts to the press at the current moment. According to the information circulating there will be between 500 and 1,000 jobs cut. This would mean a reduction of between five and eleven percent of the companies overall staffing.”

As you may have noticed we mentions that this was all at the rumor stage at this point and that no official word has been given. Well after a full day of reporting by most of the major news outlets and a hit to their stock prices because of the rumors, the company has come out with an official statement that sort of deny’s the popular theory for the layoffs.

The official statement, released by the media relations department to a reporter at Venture Beat said the following: “EA is growing and looking to hire hundreds of people for our digital, console, mobile and social games. Like all game companies, we make occasional adjustments to resize teams as projects are completed and new priorities are established. Overall, we expect that headcount will be up at the end of this year.”

A similar statement was released by the European office to MCV  that said: “There are no lay-offs as such, we always have projects growing and morphing. At any given time there are new people coming in and others leaving. EA is growing and hiring and building teams to support the growing demand for digital games and services.”

So, while they are officially denying a layoff, they are acknowledging that workers will be leaving the company in the near future. The effort, which the company is billing more as a shuffling of the staff then a proper layoff. For now the company is not talking about the specifics of how many people are actually expected to jump ship from the company. So are layoffs merely a matter of semantics or will this really be a transformation of the company? Only time will tell.