EA is laying off 6 percent of its workers

Many would say that if the company only had to lay off 6% they were taking "reasonable" risk.

Compare to say Luno who had to cut 35% of staff: https://techcabal.com/2023/01/26/luno-layoffs/

Counter: What's better for morale, your project to get stopped now and cut and you re-prioritized or let go, or a slow bleed through the year where no new headcount get put on the project as people leave for you to eventually find out in a year that management knew and kept you on that project aimlessly to "avoid a layoff"?

Personally, I'd prefer the former, as the latter would give me a lot more doubt for future projects

That would be a terrible move. The people who change jobs are generally the ones with better options. If you just do attrition you'll end up losing only the good people and you have no control over which projects / departments you starve of resources.

Your experiences as a gamer will have little to do with the kind of decision making that yields billions of dollars at the margin. There are exceptions in the game space of overnight hits becoming cottage industries (Stardew Valley, Braid) but the way those liabilities are formed are much different. The developer is the tastemaker. They are almost industries of two types you shouldn't confuse if you want your claim to hold.

It turns out that buying equipment for on-prem is capex and only tax-deductible once, whereas a cloud subscription is opex and tax-deductible year over year. So it makes financial sense to go with cloud, even if it seems counterintuitive at first because on-prem is cheaper before you apply these accounting concerns.

I think something similar applies with hiring when interest rates are low.

Every single time a layoff is done, there’s a conversation about what initiatives are on the chopping block as a result. Investments that are now lower priority are cut.

It’s really quite disappointing that the prevailing sentiment on HN seems to be that all corporate leadership are a bunch of bumbling fools. Just like technology is more complex than it looks on the surface, so too are large enterprises.

No business is an island.

I'm not parroting what I've read others say. I'm sharing my LIVED EXPERIENCE from a company that is like EA. Go look at my profile and look at the news.

This place used to feel like we had some nerds that really wanted to understand business. I'm sad that acknowledging simple macro trends is not considered table stakes anymore.

For most technology companies, salaries and compensation are one of if not the top line item in the budget. And during a time of cheap money (which is objectively true - this is not someone regurgitating other comments), companies invest in new initiatives.

So when headcount is the top line item, and new initiatives are less desirable as capital becomes more expensive…it’s pretty clear that there’s a small set of viable options to make the math work again.

And besides that, they're probably targeting rich kids across the world, out of 8 billion people that probably works out to a global addressable audience of half a billion.

As far as I can tell -- on average -- games today are relatively less expensive to buy, and yet cost significantly more to produce. So I don't think that they're a historically poor value. If anything, I think there's a stronger case to be made for the opposite proposition.

Now when inflation finally comes for video games, and you pay the same real price you were paying a few years ago, they're way too expensive.

Then there is also the cost to produce physical copies. I believe, but haven't searched, the majority of sales seems to be digital downloads.

I don't think anyone should be under the impression that publishers have been making a lot or close to the margin on sales.

They're the one company type who treat pennies like manhole covers.

Instead it makes Google look like an also-Meta in my book: cheapens them. Apple is the one coming away from this looking solid (whether it is illusional or not).