In what's becoming a sadly regular occurrence, gaming company Electronic Arts has announced a new round of layoffs. The company confirmed in a statement that it was laying off employees in an unknown number of locations, saying that the move was part of "hard but essential changes" for the company's future. Though it declined to state how many people were cut, sources have told Kotaku that the layoffs affect up to 10 percent of the workforce. EA listed around 9,000 employees in its last financial statement. Game Informer has also reported that EA is considering shutting down its Partners program, which has helped publish Crysis, Bulletstorm, and other non-EA games.

EA was voted the "worst company in America" after an extremely rocky SimCity launch, prompting COO Peter Moore to apologize and say that the company would "do better." Before the vote, CEO John Riccitiello also announced that he would be stepping down, possibly because EA had missed its financial guidance and internal goals for the quarter. But these layoffs have been going on for much longer than the current publicity problems. In 2012, BioWare suffered multiple rounds of cuts, and its San Francisco office was shut down in 2013. PopCap, which makes Plants vs. Zombies, also had its Dublin studio closed last year, with about 100 people laid off. The past few months have also seen EA's offices in San Francisco and Montreal hit with layoffs, including a round earlier this April.

With each round, EA has emphasized that it's cutting people in order to streamline its operation or move to a new generation of devices, but some of its projects also clearly haven't paid off. Earlier this month, it shut down The Sims Social and other Facebook games, bluntly saying that it had seen user activity drop off sharply. Unlike the layoffs, the Partners shutdown hasn't been confirmed by EA, but a source at Kotaku has echoed it — and given how quickly EA has been shuttering studios, it's well within the realm of possibility.

Update: Polygon's sources have given a better idea of the scope of the layoffs, saying that "hundreds" of people were affected across virtually all parts of the company. Two sources have said that the Partners program is being shut down, and employees from both PopCap Vancouver and Quicklime Games — which worked on Need for Speed — have tweeted that their studios were shut down.

Update 2: Kotaku obtained a leaked memo from EA CEO Larry Probst, which confirms a "streamlining" of the organization, but doesn't comment specifically on affected employees, studios, or the EA Partners group. However, it does suggest that studios have indeed been closed: "This process has led to some difficult decisions about the number of people and locations needed to achieve our goals." Read the whole memo below.