Battlefield 6 sold 7 million copies in its first three days, topped the Steam charts at launch, beat Call of Duty to become the best-selling premium title in the United States in 2025, and won Game of the Year at the UKIE Video Game Awards. EA has now laid off staff at every studio that made it.
The cuts hit all four pillars of Battlefield Studios simultaneously: DICE in Sweden, Criterion in the UK, Ripple Effect in California, and Motive in Canada. EA has not disclosed how many people were affected. The company's official statement, provided to IGN, reads: "We've made select changes within our Battlefield organization to better align our teams around what matters most to our community. Battlefield remains one of our biggest priorities, and we're continuing to invest in the franchise, guided by player feedback and insights from Battlefield Labs."
That is a textbook corporate non-answer, and honestly, it deserves to be called exactly that. "Select changes" and "realignment" are the kind of language companies use when they want to announce job losses without using the word layoffs. Real people lost their jobs at four studios across four countries, and EA's communications team couldn't spare a sentence to acknowledge that directly.
The Numbers Behind the Decision
To be fair, there is a business story underneath the PR language. Battlefield 6 launched in October 2025 with a concurrent Steam peak of 747,440 players, which is a genuinely impressive number. According to SteamDB, the game's most recent 24-hour peak sits at 67,080. That is a steep drop, and it matters because Battlefield 6 is a live-service game; its long-term revenue depends on keeping players engaged and spending. For context, Arc Raiders, a game with a fraction of Battlefield's marketing budget, recently posted a 24-hour peak of 235,475. That comparison will not have gone unnoticed inside EA.
The game has had a rough few months post-launch. The Redsec battle royale mode landed to mixed reviews and has since slid into Mostly Negative territory on Steam. Season two brought a gas mask feature that many players couldn't actually equip. In February, cosmetics had to be redesigned after the community rejected their original look. And a $50 premium skin was made free just one week after going on sale, which went down about as well as you'd expect.
None of that excuses cutting the workforce that is supposed to fix those exact problems. If the post-launch content pipeline is struggling and player retention is the core concern, gutting the teams responsible for content and updates is a strange solution. These studios are not being shut down, and EA insists all four will remain operational, but headcount reductions mid-live-service cycle have a way of showing up in patch cadence and content quality months later. Players will feel this eventually, even if they can't see it today.
The timing is also worth sitting with for a moment. Vince Zampella, the head of the Battlefield franchise, died in a car accident in December 2025. EA described it as an "unimaginable loss." Three months later, the studios he oversaw are absorbing layoffs. Separately, EA's shareholders have already approved a $55 billion acquisition that would hand over 93.4% of the company to a consortium including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, expected to complete in the first quarter of 2027. The people making decisions about Battlefield's workforce right now may not be the people running EA when the next entry ships.
Make no mistake, this is a pattern. EA recently cut staff at Full Circle, the studio behind Skate. The Battlefield cuts follow the same playbook: record-setting launch, player retention drops, studios absorb the consequences. The real question is what "continuing to invest in the franchise" actually looks like when you've just reduced the number of people doing the work across every team involved. Credit where it's due, Battlefield 6 was a genuine course correction after the disaster of 2042. Shipping layoffs to the teams that pulled that off is a poor way to protect what they built.
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