EA DICE Studio Update - COVID-19

PartWelsh

Hi all,

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Wanted to replicate some messaging for you that we've just shared from EA DICE, and provide you a quick update on what to expect for the next few weeks.

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Here's a copy of the message just in case you haven't seen it:

Hey folks,
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Today we’ve taken the necessary steps to help enable our teams across DICE with the option of working remotely, in order to best protect their health and wellbeing in response to the COVID-19 Outbreak. We also wanted to take the time and share a few quick points with you, our players, in order to help you all understand what effect this will have on our games.
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This will not have an impact on our infrastructure. All of our titles will remain online, our servers remain active, and we have live support teams across the globe that we work with each and every day that help to monitor and track the health of our services.
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If you encounter anything weird in our games, we’re likely already on top of it, and we’ll still be able to keep you informed on our progress for addressing any live issues.
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So what will this affect?
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We’ll need some time to switch up some parts of our workflows and adapt to the change. Remote work isn’t new to us, we’re a flexible Studio that always supports our team with the ability to work from home, but to do it en masse will likely throw up the odd hiccup that we’ll work with our central teams at EA to resolve as quickly as possible.
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We’ve also decided to openly share all of our processes, learnings and decisions with the wider Swedish games industry to support all small and big studios out there as they potentially start exploring work-from-home setups.
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In turn, this may result in short delays to our next sequence of monthly updates, and extend the time between updates beyond your usual expectations, but we largely anticipate no significant changes for any of our planned releases.
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In the meantime, we’ll still be engaged with folks across the Studio helping to share your feedback, and supporting the teams with their production of future content.
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We’ll keep you updated and over communicate with you on all things. If the COVID-19 Outbreak necessitates any further changes, we’ll let you know.
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Big thanks for your understanding. Stay healthy!
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EA DICE

In terms of Battlefield V, we're presently completing our review of the launch of Update 6.2, and working on finalising Update 6.4 (which we originally planned on our internal scheduling to deliver in the first week of April). It may be that we lose some time as we help our teams to make the transition, and potentially we may briefly slow down our ability to remove issues such as ‘Unable to join via the Friends Panel’ tracked over on our Trello, but our next updates will continue to focus on removing issues, and improving the experience across the game.

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Naturally, you'll need more updates from us as we go through these next few weeks and I'll be around to help provide those.

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In the mean time, be well!

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Freeman // PartWelsh