Well. that was... expected. Who knew?
EA cutting another round of staff is the entirely predictable bill coming due on a buyout the company spent last autumn insisting wouldn't touch jobs. When the $55 billion deal to take EA private was announced in September, with Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners making up the consortium, employees were understandably nervous. EA's reassurance in October was that there would be "no immediate changes" to its workforce. Eight months later, here are the changes. The cuts reportedly hit recruitment, customer support, trust and safety, and IT.
To understand why this was always coming, you have to look at how a leveraged buyout actually functions, because it explains everything about EA's near future. The deal is structured with roughly $36 billion in equity from the consortium plus around $20 billion in debt financing arranged by JPMorgan Chase, and that debt doesn't evaporate, it gets loaded onto EA itself once the deal closes. Servicing that kind of debt requires cash, and the fastest, bluntest way for any company to free up cash is to cut payroll. In plain terms, the new owners borrowed a fortune to buy EA, and EA is now the one that has to pay it back, which makes headcount the most obvious lever to pull.
The only issue is This isn't a company in distress trimming to survive. EA just posted $7.5 billion in net revenue for the fiscal year ending in March, up one percent year over year.
Whose Jobs Go First Tells You the Priorities
Recruitment, Fan Care, trust and safety, and IT are hit basically the people the people who answer player support tickets, moderate communities, keep internal tooling running, and handle the hiring pipeline. An internal email to the Fan Care team framed it as needing to "adapt how we work to better meet fans' changing needs," with work being moved to "different teams, locations, or service partners." That last phrase is the tell, because "service partners" is corporate for outsourcing, the quiet replacement of in-house staff with cheaper external contractors. The human cost here isn't abstract either, since the cuts reportedly landed on remote US workers and on long-serving employees at EA's Hyderabad office in India.
Success Stopped Being Protection a While Ago
This is the the third wave of layoffs at Electronic Arts studios in 2026 alone, following March cuts across the Battlefield studios, DICE, Criterion, Ripple Effect, and Motive. And those March cuts came right after Battlefield 6 sold more than seven million copies in three days and became the best-selling premium game of 2025 in the United States.
With the EU antitrust deadline looming on July 22 and the deal expected to close soon, the restructuring is almost certainly not finished, since the debt that's driving it will still be there long after these particular roles are gone. EA's leadership called the buyout "a new era of opportunity."
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