The four main studios behind Battlefield unexpectedly faced staff cuts despite the resounding success of Battlefield 6.

EA has announced that Battlefield Studios, the consortium of studios behind Battlefield 6, will undergo 'changes' that appear to lead to staff reductions.

To compete with the vast resources of the series' biggest rival – Call of Duty, EA merged former Battlefield developers DICE and Ripple Effect with Motive Studios (Dead Space remake, Star Wars Battlefront 2) and Criterion Games (Burnout, Need For Speed ​​Most Wanted) to create Battlefield 6. This quartet is collectively known as Battlefield Studios, with each studio focusing on different elements during the development of Battlefield 6.

Initially, this multi-studio plan seemed to work very effectively. Battlefield 6 was a resounding success upon its release, peaking at 747,000 players on Steam. Battlefield Labs was praised as a brilliant, player-centric initiative that allowed for quick responses to avoid future complaints.

Battlefield 6 even became the best-selling game of 2025 in the United States, unexpectedly beating Call of Duty Black Ops 7, with seven million copies sold in just three days. This installment was widely considered a return to the peak of the Battlefield series.

However, despite initially appearing poised to become one of the best first-person shooter (FPS) titles in the series' history, it began to face criticism due to complaints about map size, development issues, concerns about resources appearing to be AI-generated, and other problems. Despite the ambitious launch of the free-to-play spinoff Battlefield Redsec – a survival game clearly designed to compete with Call of Duty Warzone – the content offered after Battlefield 6's launch failed to engage players. Even the delayed Season 2, released just weeks prior, didn't live up to player expectations for the kind of content they were hoping for.

IGN was the first to report that EA was notifying employees about a 'restructuring' at Battlefield Studios, resulting in some layoffs. Currently, there is no information on the scale of these cuts.

For a game that was one of last year's biggest commercial successes, hearing about layoffs is truly surprising, regardless of the number of positions affected. If this is indeed a significant cut affecting a large percentage of Battlefield Studios' staff, it would indicate either that the revenue targets for Battlefield 6 after launch were too high, or that there was a serious drop in player spending during Seasons 1 and 2, or both.

Certainly, the peak player count on Steam is now much lower than the dizzying numbers we saw at launch (currently only around 50,000 to 70,000), but that's still a fairly stable number of players each day.