Electronic Arts Inc. is laying off hundreds of workers and canceling a Titanfall game that was in development at its Respawn Entertainment subsidiary.
Between 300 and 400 positions were eliminated, including around 100 at Respawn, according to a person familiar with the cuts. The company had about 13,700 employees at the end of March 2024.
“As part of our continued focus on our long-term strategic priorities, we’ve made select changes within our organization that more effectively aligns teams and allocates resources in service of driving future growth,” Justin Higgs, a spokesman for the Redwood City, California-based company, said in a statement.
Publicly traded companies are detrimental to the health of the (gaming) ecosystem. A Titanfall game would have been a financial and cultural net positive for sure - maximizing for profit means losing out on everything else.
It was an extraction shooter set in the Apex Legends/Titanfall universe, apparently.
So we’re gonna need some citation on the “cultural net positive” issue, I’m afraid.
Be mad at public companies if you want, but take some time to go find whoever convinced gaming execs that Escape from Tarkov was the next PUBG and they had a chance to slot in as the next Fortnite. You could have gotten a new Marathon campaign instead, speaking of cultural net positives.
I mean the OG team who’d been together since MoH Allied Assault all the way through the early MW games, only to then make Titanfall are no longer with respawn.
They’ve been for like half a decade. Whatever magic that company had has been long gone.
Also if you want to feel old, Titanfall is basically the chronilogical half way point between allied assault and now.
So however old the quake 3 engine felt in 2014 is how old that game should feel now, eek…
Hah. That does makes me feel ancient for more than one reason.
Titanfall is a particularly rough example for those comparisons because it’s only a last-gen title, technically. There was a 360 version, but it was a downport, technically the original is Xbox One. The 360 version definitely does look its age, though.