EA is laying off hundreds world-wide including a big chunk of its Montreal ganming studio.

The layoffs come a few weeks after EA’s CEO, John Riccitiello, resigned over the company’s poor financial results, saying he wanted EA to have “a clean start” in fiscal 2014.

“EA is sharpening its focus to provide games for new platforms and mobile,” European spokesperson Tiffany Steckler replied in an email.

“In some cases, that involves reducing team sizes as we evolve into a more efficient organization.”

In an annual readership poll by Consumer Reports magazine online subsidiary The Consumerist, EA was voted “worst company in America” two years running — 2012 and 2013.

It beat out Bank of America, Ticketmaster, AT&T, Facebook and Anheuser-Busch — all lightning rods for public dissatisfaction — to take the “prize.”

Commenting on the survey, Consumerist said EA treats its customers “like human piggy banks,” and puts out “so many incomplete and/or broken games” that people “pay extra for what they should have received in the first place.”

http://www.montrealgazette.com/business ... story.html