According to a report from Insider Gaming, the Apex Legends quality assurance (QA) UK team is being entirely shutdown, with 40 contract developers impacted.
EA has previously made cuts to specifically the QA team around Apex Legends, a choice that continues to confuse players, especially after Respawn is currently recovering from a massive issue that saw players lose all of their purchased and earned in-game items and progress markers just last week.
This isn’t the first time that specifically the QA team for Apex Legends has taken a hit. Last year EA cut over 200 people from the Apex Legends QA team. This time it’s another 40.
The report also stipulates that these layoffs are not part of the massive restructuring that EA announced at the beginning of this year, which resulted in 670 people being laid off.
That layoff did also impact the Apex Legends team, but it seems like this shutdown adds another 40 people to the list of those laid off by EA.
Employees were notified that their contracts wouldn’t be renewed during a mass Zoom call, where it management cited “restructuring of the business” as the reason for the layoff, rather than performance, according to the report.
The report also clarifies that this layoff came to the surprise of even team leads, who didn’t find out until those who reported to them made them aware of the layoff.
These 40 QA contractors were only weeks away from finishing their contracts, and according to a source of Insider’s, “Everything seemed to be heading to a normal renewal ready to tackle the next year of plans for Apex.”
It is once again unfortunate to see more developers blindsided by layoffs, and hopefully those impacted will be able to land on their feet.
Source – [Insider Gaming]