Geoff Keighley of The Game Awards talks with Laura Miele of EA.

EA’s Laura Miele: Making games is hard, and it keeps changing

Laura Miele said Electronic Arts is in charge of more than 8,000 game developers at more than 22 studio locations. But in the past year, the publisher’s chief of studios hasn’t seen much of those people.

In a fireside chat with Geoff Keighley at our GamesBeat Summit 2021 online event, Miele talked about what it was like to manage game teams during the pandemic. Miele gained about 500 more developers to manage today as EA closed the $2.4 billion acquisition of mobile game publisher Glu Mobile. EA also picked up more than 750 employees with the $1.2 billion of racing game maker Codemasters. All told, EA will have about 11,550 total employees after the Glu deal.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.