EA is the latest gaming company to begin limiting social gatherings to "fight this epidemic."
EA confirmed in a post on its official website that all live gaming events will be postponed until "the global coronavirus situation improves".
Immediately affected events include the Apex Legends Global Series, the FIFA 20 Global Series, FIFA Online 4 Live, and the Madden NFL 20 Championship Series. Online activities that participants and staff will perform remotely will continue as planned.
"This is an unprecedented day, it is an unprecedented few days," EA said in the post. As the world works to limit the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, a wide range of social and cultural changes are affecting our daily lives. We want to take a moment to introduce you to what we do at Electronic Arts to ensure the health and well-being of our employees, while also ensuring that everyone can continue to play their favorite games. "
"When we take these steps for employees in the electronics industry, we are also very focused on minimizing disruption to players. We have confidence in our continuity plan. We don't want teams working from home to result in games or services Significant changes have occurred, but we are also learning through this process, and patience will be key. We have been talking to and working with teams around the world to evolve as the situation changes.
"This is a challenging time for everyone. We are working hard to take care of our employees and their families and to ensure that we are taking correct and responsible steps to fight this pandemic. We have an amazing technical team We are grateful for all of these things being possible. Now we have thousands of employees bringing the devices home so we can keep the games and services running and continue working on new projects. We This may be done in homes around the world, but we are doing everything we can to help you. "
EA has also joined more and more game developers, asking employees to work from home. Earlier today, Rockstar confirmed that its development team will begin working remotely "to reduce the possible impact of COVID-19." Both Bunge and Microsoft announced their remote work plans last week.
According to EA, the company "strongly recommends" that all employees in North America, Europe and Australia work remotely until April 1 "to help limit potential exposure to the coronavirus and minimize the social spread of the disease".
"Since January, we have set up a global task force to closely monitor the development of coronaviruses and work daily to respond in real time to the changing needs of our personnel. We have been advised by local and federal health authorities as well as Guided by the information we obtain from our own team, we assess the exposure risks we face in areas where we have offices.
"In Asia, we have been working in accordance with regional health and government guidance. We previously closed our offices in Shanghai, Singapore and Seoul and Milan, and worked from home. As the situation in Shanghai and Singapore stabilized, our The team will now resume work under the guidance of regional health officials. Our locations in Seoul and Milan are still closed and these teams continue to work remotely. "
The post continued: "Many locations, including our Redwood Shores headquarters, have provided employees with the option of working from home, and now it is time to take greater steps. At these sites we have very limited staff Perform critical business functions-everyone else will work remotely. Our senior executives, site directors and IT teams have been working together to help us prepare for this.
"We have also taken steps to ensure that suppliers and contractors who provide services on-site at our factories will continue to be paid even if they are unable to work from home."