EA Quietly Cuts Customer Support and Recruitment Jobs as the $55B Saudi PIF Sale Closes In

Electronic Arts is cutting jobs again, and the timing is impossible to ignore. Kotaku confirmed this week that EA quietly let go of an unknown number of employees across recruitment, customer support, trust and safety, and IT, with laid-off staff posting about it publicly and a department head email framing the cuts as work to adapt how the company meets fans changing needs. Multiple individuals in EA Hyderabad had been with the company for more than ten years when they got the axe. The company declined to comment.

The deal that triggered it

The cuts land squarely between two EU filings from the $55 billion take-private deal Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake Partners, and Jared Kushner Affinity Partners announced last September. Reuters reported on June 17 that the European Commission set a July 22 deadline for its merger review, and a second Reuters story from this morning confirms the group filed for the bloc Foreign Subsidies Regulations review with a July 30 deadline. Both clearances still need to land before the consortium can close, and the layoffs are a tell that the new owners are already trimming the ship before the paperwork is even dry.

Why fans and Hyderabad staff feel the squeeze

Cutting customer support first is a choice, and it is the same one EA has been making for years. The Fan Care team is the one players hit when their Madden Ultimate Team pack breaks, when their FC 26 account gets hijacked, or when a Battlefield 6 matchmaking ban looks wrong. Trust and safety handles the worst of it, the predators, the doxxers, the harassment reports. Those are the people EA just told to adapt. If you have ever waited four hours for a generic email back from EA support, this is why. If you have ever seen a stalker get reported and nothing happen, this is also why.

The Hyderabad cuts hit harder. That office is one of EA biggest engineering and operations hubs outside Redwood City, and laying off people with a decade of tenure is not a cost optimization, it is a reset. New owners love a clean runway, and tenured staff with severance obligations are the first thing a private equity buyer wants to clear. The Saudi PIF is not a typical acquirer. It is a sovereign wealth fund with a mandate to reshape global entertainment, and it does not need a long memory of who built the studio. It needs a P and L that looks like a SaaS company by the next earnings cycle.

Rolling layoffs, not a one-off

This is at minimum the third round of EA cuts in 2026 alone. Earlier this year the company trimmed Skate and Battlefield 6 developers, even though Battlefield 6 became the best-selling premium game of 2025 in the United States. The year before that it was around 300 company-wide, including roughly 100 at Respawn, plus the full shutdown of Cliffhanger Games, the Black Panther studio. In 2024 the headcount dropped by roughly 670. In 2023 EA laid off over 200 Apex Legends testers on a Zoom call, then chopped almost 800 people weeks after posting record profits. Each round was sold as restructuring. Each round was the same kind of restructuring, with the same quiet department heads, the same boilerplate framing, and the same fan-facing teams that have to absorb the work afterward.

What changes under Saudi PIF ownership

The PIF is the same fund that owns stakes in Nintendo, Activision Blizzard, Scopely, and a long list of fighting game and sports organizations. It is also the fund behind the Esports World Cup, the LIV Golf tour, and the Saudi gaming and sports push more broadly. When a sovereign wealth fund with that mandate takes a publisher private, the levers it pulls are predictable: headcount down, operating margins up, premium live-service monetization cranked, and more Saudi-backed tournaments in the IP roadmap. EA already launched a fully built in-game advertising platform earlier this month, with Visa, Red Bull, Lowe and others wired into Madden, FC, and College Football. That product got a lot more interesting the moment a sovereign buyer showed up.

Critical Pixel take

The people getting cut are not the ones who decided to sell the company. CEO Andrew Wilson is staying on, the board is staying on, the executive comp is not getting touched. The deal was announced, the staff are being trimmed, and the new owners will likely point to leaner operations as proof the acquisition thesis is working. That is the part that should make every player in the FC 26 and Madden ecosystems pay attention, because the next time your support ticket takes a week to clear, or your refund is denied, or your account is locked with no human response, the explanation will not be a glitch. It will be the same PIF playbook that already swallowed Activision, already runs Saudi Arabia gaming strategy, and is now in the EA driver seat. The EU has roughly a month to decide whether it cares. Fans should care more.