BioWare Is 50 of EA's 400 Cuts. Source Full Circle and Maxis Instead

If you searched "BioWare" after EA's October 2026 layoffs, you mostly found people who aren't on the market. According to Bloomberg, only about 50 of EA's roughly 400 cuts were at BioWare.

The headlines said BioWare because EA is closing the studio, so that's the name most recruiters typed into a search bar. The cuts came two months after the $55B Saudi-led buyout took EA private, and most of the people now looking for work come from studios and codenamed projects that barely show up in a keyword search.

Where did EA's 400 layoffs actually land?

Bloomberg puts about 50 of EA's roughly 400 cuts at BioWare. Most of the rest came from studios other than BioWare: the cuts reportedly reached Respawn, Maxis, Full Circle and EA Motive.

The cut works out to roughly 3% of EA's staff. EA's own announcement didn't give a total or a breakdown by studio, so every per-studio figure you see comes from reporting, not from EA. Treat them as estimates.

~50 of 400

Here is what is known for each studio:

Full Circle has now cut twice this year. It announced layoffs in February, when it was estimated to have hired up to 200 people, and developers from many departments posted about it on LinkedIn then too. If you are hiring from skate., there are two groups of leavers to look at, eight months apart.

Why does a "BioWare" search return the wrong people?

A "BioWare" search returns the wrong people for two reasons. Substring matching pulls in unrelated companies, and BioWare has 30 years of alumni whose headlines still carry the name. In Refolk's index of professional profiles, "BioWare" in Canada returns 265 profiles, but only 10 of a 25-profile sample (40%) list BioWare as their current employer.

The other 15 in that sample include:

• False matches. Four work at BIOLASE and two at Nobel Biocare. Both are dental and medical-device companies whose names happen to contain "bio."
• Alumni. Some now work at CD PROJEKT RED or Unknown Worlds. They weren't part of this layoff.

The studios that together made up most of the layoff barely show up at all. Here is how the three searches compare in Refolk's index. These are headline-keyword matches, not headcounts.

66x

The search volume runs backwards from where the layoffs fell. BioWare gets about 66 times the matches of Full Circle and about 20 times the matches of Maxis. If your search tool sorts by keyword hits, BioWare alumni will fill page one and the skate. team won't appear on it.

Why do studio and codename searches find almost nobody?

Studio and codename searches come up nearly empty because people don't put them in their headlines. Full Circle staff tend to write "skate." or just their discipline, and no one wrote "Project Lotus" in a headline because EA never announced it.

The four Full Circle profiles in Refolk's index show what happens:

1. Senior Narrative Animator
2. Senior Lighting Artist
3. Sr Technical Art Director (skate. runtime, visuals and performance)
4. Technical Designer

Two are in Greater Vancouver and one is in Edmonton. A studio estimated to have hired up to 200 people shows up four times in a headline search. Everyone else is filed under a discipline title, with Full Circle sitting in the experience section where a headline query never looks.

Maxis has the same problem with one more wrinkle. Of the 13 "Maxis Sims" profiles, 6 list Maxis Studios as their employer and 4 list EA, so the same team shows up under two names. Four are in the San Francisco Bay Area. Titles include Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer, Principal Game Designer and Lead Producer (Sims 4 SDX). The group is small and senior, and two of the 13 already describe themselves as founders.

The fix is to search a person's work history, not their headline. That means past-employer fields, the products they shipped, and the posts where people announce they were laid off ("my role at Full Circle has been eliminated"). Doing that by hand across LinkedIn is slow. It's the gap Refolk is built for: you describe the person you want in a sentence, and it matches on employment history and posts, so you don't depend on someone having typed a codename into their headline.

Who has posted publicly, and what does that tell you?

Everyone named publicly so far works in creative or design roles, not backend engineering. That tells you who has posted first. It doesn't tell you who was cut.

These people have said publicly that they were laid off or are looking:

• John Epler, seasonal creative director at Full Circle and an EA veteran of almost 20 years. One outlet spelled his name "Euler," so search both spellings.
• Adam Martinazzi and David Milne, senior designers at Full Circle.
• Brendan Vermeltfoort and Will Granda, artists at Full Circle.
• Anna Huerta, Senior Creative Director on The Sims for five years, who says she is open to opportunities.

Every named person who has posted is in creative or design. That tells you who is posting, not who was cut.

That matters for how you pitch. Nobody has published a list of laid-off EA engineers, and you shouldn't pretend one exists. What you can do is look at what these teams built, which tells you what their engineers spent the last few years doing.

Which skills from these teams carry over outside games?

The skills that carry over are multiplayer networking, cross-platform client engineering including mobile, user-generated content systems, and free-to-play monetization. You can see this in the products: skate. is a multiplayer Frostbite game on seven platforms including Android and iOS, and Project Lotus has been speculatively linked to a free-to-play mobile game built around user-generated content.

Here is the evidence, product by product:

Two caveats. EA's memo says Lotus is "paused," but Sims Community reads LinkedIn posts as saying it's cancelled. The idea that Lotus and Project Rene are the same project is Sims Community's guess, not something EA has confirmed. If you pitch a Maxis engineer on "your Rene experience," ask first. Don't assume.

Leadership is another clue. Full Circle's general manager, Daniel McCulloch, used to run Xbox Live at Microsoft. That's a hint, not proof, that online services sit near the center of how the studio works.

This is also why a Maxis engineer from a cut free-to-play, UGC-style project may suit a consumer app or creator-platform team better than an AAA console studio. The skills that matter there are content pipelines, monetization and mobile performance, not console rendering.

Why is location a weak filter for EA's leavers?

Location is a weak filter here because EA moves people between studios, and Full Circle hires around the world even though it's based in Vancouver. A city filter will drop people you want.

Three facts point this way:

• One of the four Full Circle profiles in Refolk's index is in Edmonton, BioWare's city, not Vancouver.
• EA's memo offers redeployment inside the company, so some people listed under one studio this week will show up under another next month.
• Of the 13 Maxis profiles, 4 are in the Bay Area, so the rest are spread elsewhere in the US and Canada.

If you filter to "Vancouver" for Full Circle or "Edmonton" for BioWare, you lose remote staff and anyone who was moved between studios. Search by employer and product first, then use location to rank the results, not to exclude people.

How do you find EA's laid-off developers this week?

Search for the products these people built and the posts where they announced the layoff, not for brand names in headlines. Then widen the location and remove the false matches. This process works for any codenamed layoff, not only this one.

1. Search past-employer fields for Full Circle, Maxis, Maxis Studios, Respawn and EA Motive. Search "EA" combined with product names too, since 4 of the 13 Maxis profiles list EA, not the studio.
2. Search by product ("skate.", "The Sims 4", "Sims 4 SDX"). People list what they shipped more often than they list codenames.
3. Search posts, not profiles, for layoff phrasing: "role at Full Circle has been eliminated," "impacted by the EA layoffs," "open to opportunities" alongside Sims. Include known misspellings such as "Euler."
4. Exclude false matches before you count. Remove BIOLASE, Nobel Biocare and anyone whose BioWare role ended years ago.
5. Remove location filters at first, then rank Vancouver, Edmonton, the Bay Area and remote candidates near the top.
6. Check for founders. Two of 13 Maxis profiles have already started something, so the strongest senior people may be building their own thing, not job hunting.
7. Pitch the skill, not the genre. Lead with multiplayer, cross-platform shipping or UGC systems, and show how your role uses them.

Doing this by hand is where the week goes. You run each studio name, each product and each post phrase as its own LinkedIn search, check every result against employment dates, and then find out that only four people had the keyword where your tool looks.

Whatever tool you use, the principle holds. Most of the people affected by EA's October 2026 layoffs never had "BioWare" in their profile, so a BioWare search won't find them.

FAQ

How many people did EA lay off in October 2026?

Bloomberg reported about 400 jobs, roughly 3% of EA's staff, including about 50 at BioWare. EA's public announcement didn't give a total or a breakdown by studio. The cuts also reportedly reached Respawn, Maxis, Full Circle and EA Motive.

Is Maxis's Project Lotus cancelled or paused?

EA's memo says it is "pausing development on 'Project Lotus'" to put resources into Project Evergreen. Sims Community says LinkedIn posts suggest the project is effectively cancelled, and it has speculated that Lotus is the same project as Project Rene, which was reportedly scaled back to a free-to-play mobile game. Neither the cancellation nor the Rene link is confirmed.

Are the laid-off EA developers mostly engineers?

Nobody knows yet. Everyone who has posted publicly so far works in creative or design: artists, senior designers and creative directors. Engineers were probably affected too, but the case for their skills comes from what the products were (cross-platform including mobile, multiplayer, built on Frostbite, and in Maxis's case free-to-play), not from any published list.

Should I only search Edmonton for BioWare's laid-off staff?

No. BioWare was only about 50 of the roughly 400 cuts, EA is offering redeployment inside the company, and at least one indexed Full Circle profile is in Edmonton. Search by employer history and shipped products first, include Vancouver, the Bay Area and remote candidates, and use location to rank people, not to exclude them.