[busterarm]

> In particular, a person I know from EA Games saw half their department let go, and then replacements appeared a couple months later. All of them had lower pay and were less skilled. This all reads like quarterly profit optimizations by a bean counter up top looking to make the shares look good.

This is just the regular course of business in the games industry. They like to scale up and down according to need (games in development) and would largely prefer to employ contractors, but laws prevent them working contractors like dogs and studios go where the tax credits are & tax credits require having employees typically.