A few days after the NPD Group announced that overall game sales in the US plummeted yet again in March, there are rumors that one of the biggest game publishers is about to announce a large amount of layoffs. Startup Grind, citing unnamed but multiple sources, claims that EA will announce the layoffs sometime this coming week.
The article claims that between 500 and 1,000 members of EA could be looking for work soon, which means that the company could be saying good bye to as much as 11 percent of its total workforce.
The article cites several reasons for the decision, including the high cost ($750 million) of acquiring casual game publisher PopCap in July 2011. It also claims that EA had disappointing sales of two heavily hyped products in the fall of 2011, Battlefield 3 and Star Wars The Old Republic. EA has yet to announce when it will reveal its financial results for the quarter that ended on March 31.
Earlier this month, EA got slammed by the readers of The Consumerist website with the title of "Worst Company in America", beating out other, perhaps more worthy, companies like Bank of America, AT&T and Walmart for that dubious honor.
Update - An EA rep has told the Develop site, "There are no lay-offs as such, we always have projects growing and morphing."