Exceptional employer and amazing team. Very boring. - Producer Electronic Arts Employee Review

EA is extremely safe, stable, predictable, and risk adverse. You won't take chances or try new things. You wont' get to make changes or touch the games in a personal way. You will take the least risky, most boring, approach to everything and the business will be successful doing so. I in no way judge the company for this approach, but it makes for a very boring job if you're the person who likes a dynamic, engaging, and creative atmosphere. Approach to live-ops (EA calls it Live Service) is substantially worse than the rest of the industry. They're operating about 7 years behind and aren't catching up - rather, the gap is widening. Because the company moves so slowly and is so risk adverse, changing this is unlikely. The result is frustration as you see something be done poorly and are unable to affect change. Because EA is such a great employer, turnover is too low. This means teams are mostly staffed by 10+ year vets on each game. While a legitimately impressive accomplishment, it means that new ideas are generally frowned upon, and people are very stuck in their own ways. A lot of EA's success is market fit and timing, but is often falsely attributed to the wrong thing. As long as they own the market they should be fine, but it means that if the market changes, the company is not well adapted to pivot. Base salary is quite low. Overall compensation ends up fairly high, but that's contingent on stock grants and bonuses which are sometimes unpredictable. In general, EA has a completely different approach to game development than the rest of the industry. While not strictly bad, the hard requirement of a "DD (Project Manager), Producer (creative and business lead) and TD (tech lead) on every single project can be ponderous. Sometimes a tech lead doesn't need a producer breathing down their neck. Sometimes a producer doesn't need a project manager holding their hand. Be prepared to move slooooowly.