EA took the axe to BioWare last week after a long, slow death partially born of mandates to either work on live service games that didn't work (Anthem) or pivot from live service games in messy, chaotic development cycles (Veilguard). A report from Vertical Slice now also claims that its employee morale is at an all-time low.
Speaking to the site's Chris Kerr, choosing to remain anonymous, sources state that "Morale has been terrible. The line we kept hearing is 'do less, better' but it just felt like we were doing the same amount with less people."
It doesn't help that "upper management was very excited about Claude and the possibilities of [generative] AI, much to the chagrin of my team." It's not entirely shocking that generative AI is exciting the executive class—and, to give credit where it's perhaps undue, there are places in which the use of AI could, if applied conservatively, save on busywork.
But in an utterly brutal industry environment, none of these employees seem keen on the idea that management might replace them with AI while not understanding their jobs: "The message from every single manager I've heard is 'this is the future, you have to get onboard'," writes one source, while another adds: "They won't tell you these tools are a mandate, but they'll make it impossible or very difficult for you to do your job without [them]."
Another source in the article claims that there is a sense that "EA executives cannot fail, only be failed. They've been fortunate that [EA Sports FC] sells and makes so much money that it can finance their bad bets."
That is a pervasive feeling—one does have to wonder why the axe falls first on the employees rather than, say, executive-level pay or bonuses, some of which could fund the yearly salaries of dozens of employees handily. Take Battlefield 6, for instance, which laid off several developers and then paid EA's CEO $38 million for the game's success.
To further put it in perspective, Andrew Wilson's yearly pay was worth roughly 305 median salaries at the publisher's studios in 2025.
To return to BioWare for a moment, the report also paints an ugly picture of the mismanagement of that studio. Predictably, the constant cajoling to try and get it to make a live service masterpiece.
"A lot of money got wasted going down these roads that didn't lead anywhere," says one source, while another writes: "There was never a desire to take risks. Never a desire to do anything interesting. It was just 'here is what these 14 UXR [User Experience Research] studies are saying, so we've got to do it this way."
Like the cherry on top of a terrible sundae, Vertical Slice's reporting ends with an eminently quotable summation of the entire fiasco: "That the recent email about the organisation changes [sounded like] it was written by a robot best sums up EA. A cold dead place that's slowly decaying as leadership pilfers every last cent, leaving the rest of us to worry about how we feed our families."
