The Seattle video game firm Ridgeline Games, owned by Electronic Arts, is closing after the leader of the company left and layoffs occurred throughout EA. When the studio would close was not disclosed by the firm. The Redwood City, California-based company EA said on Wednesday that it was letting go of about 670 employees or 5% of its staff. At the time, CEO Andrew Wilson stated that the business was responding to the “accelerating industry transformation” with various participant demands and incentives.
Wilson said in a statement;
“We are continuing to optimize our global real estate footprint to best support our business. We are also sunsetting games and moving away from the development of future licensed [intellectual property] that we do not believe will be successful in our changing industry.”
Popular series like The Sims, Madden NFL, and FIFA which underwent a rebranding this year as FC 24 are among the blockbuster games developed by EA. As of Friday, EA had not submitted a layoff or closure notification to the Employment Security Department of Washington, which is required of businesses in the event that a sizable portion of their workforce is set to lose their employment.
According to Laura Miele, head of entertainment and technology at EA, some Ridgeline workers will be transferred to the Los Angeles-based company Ripple Effect, where they will continue to work on the upcoming Battlefield game. Ridgeline, a 2022 opening, was involved with the development of the first-person shooter game series Battlefield. Marcus Lehto, a co-creator of Halo, oversaw the company and said on Tuesday that he was leaving Ridgeline and EA voluntarily.
In August 2022, EA leased office space for Ridgeline in a 53,000-square-foot facility located in Kirkland. A Puget Sound Business Journal article at the time states that EA had around 230 employment opportunities advertised in Seattle. Other Seattle studios are owned by the massive game company. In the previous year, it allowed Cliffhanger Games to begin developing a Black Panther single-player game in third person. It also has a studio for EA Digital Platform and the PopCap Games studio, which is located in the Belltown district and produces Plants versus Animals.
The most recent Seattle-based business to announce layoffs in the video gaming industry is EA. Microsoft said in January that it was laying off 1,900 employees in its gaming sector, which included Activision Blizzard, Xbox, and ZeniMax, which it had recently bought. Of the people who work in gaming, 8.6% were impacted by the announced reduction. The massive Redmond-based company refused to say how many of its workers in the Seattle region might lose their jobs.
Over the previous 14 months, thousands of jobs in the games business have been lost due to layoffs, reorganizations, and closures, the most recent of which were EA’s two rounds of layoffs in February. A rolling tally kept by Zack Zweizen and Kenneth Shepard of Kotaku indicates that at least 8,177 workers at game creators and other companies including Discord, Unity, and Twitch were let go in 2024.
