According to IGN, EA has reduced an unknown number of employees in its field development teams, involving Criterion, DICE, Ripple Effect and Motive Studios.
The affected staff members were informed that this reduction was part of the “reorganization” of the field studio complex and that the team was providing ongoing online service support after the sale of field 6. Four workshops will continue to operate, but this reduction appears to have affected multiple teams in various workshops and offices. The spokesperson for EA stated to IGN: “We have made selective adjustments within the field organization to better align the team around the most important issues for our community. Fields remains one of our top priorities, and we are investing in this series on a continuous basis, based on player feedback and Battlefield Labs’ insights.” Field 6 was the best-selling game in the United States in 2025, with a sales volume of 7 million in three days, making the best first in the series. However, several months after the sale, the game began to experience difficulties in various updates. Players criticized many updates, including skin, mobile mechanisms, etc. Three months after going online, Steam’s evaluation fell from “mostly favourable” to “unsatisfactory” when it was first released. Key issues include over-commercialization, the use of generated AI to make skins in games and lower-than-anticipated content updates. The high level of criticism forced the team to postpone the second quarter to allow time for community feedback. Field 6 was launched with a peak of 74,4740 people and is now generally maintained at tens of thousands. Yesterday, for example, the peak on the V Social Platform was about 67,000 people. While the number of players has remained stable, the highest number of simultaneous online players at the beginning of the second season was only around 90,000, with a significant decrease in heat compared to the early stage of the game.
Of course, Steam data does not fully reflect the human quality or sales of the game, because Field 6 is also available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, but it is also sufficient to provide an idea of the current status of the game. Only 66 per cent of the over 320,000 Steam user evaluations were positive and the overall evaluation was “unsatisfactory”. In the current situation, the loss of field 6 users may be more severe than expected by EA. At the same time, Field 6 has faced its own problems with a free-of-charge large-scale escape model, the no-go zone conflict, recently evaluated by Steam users as “mostly poor”.
This reduction was only a few months before Vince Zampera, the head of the field series, died as a result of a car accident, and also at a time when the EA was to be acquired by a consortium of investment agencies under the Saudi Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake Capital, etc., at a cost of approximately $55 billion. However, the transaction is not yet complete (expected to be completed in the first financial quarter of 2027, from April to June). Internal IGN sources indicate that this reduction was not related to the acquisition.