You can't do any choppin' without me!

We're in the teeth of the recession and the financial meltdown continues to batter the gaming industry. Yesterday, Electronic Arts announced plans to close 12 offices, downside their 2010 game portfolio to 50 titles, and buck-down on spending which means another round of layoffs to hit company-wide. In all, 11% percent of the total workforce is up on the chopping block. That's over 1100 positions ranging from low-level staff and into the upper echelons of corporate will cease to exist.

That means no studio under Electronic Arts wing is safe from layoffs and a huge axe fell upon Mythic Entertainment cutting a swath through a huge number of employees working on Warhammer Online. This comes one day after finding out Warhammer Online's 300k subscription count. Mark Jacobs CEO of Mythic Entertainment updated fans on the unfortunate downsizing and what it means for Warhammer: Age of Reckoning.

Mark Jacob's statement from the Warhammer Herald:

Mythic has always been committed to maintaining a high level of development and customer service to our MMO players. In anticipation of rumors regarding staff reductions here at Mythic today, this seems like a good time to provide some insight into the future of development, customer service, quality assurance and play testing at Mythic. Though we are resizing the team to move from a pre-launch to a post-launch size, we remain fully committed to creating and delivering the best WAR experience.

We have a very exciting schedule planned for new WAR content and that schedule is unchanged. Over the next few months, the announced "Call to Arms" live expansion events, new careers, new Tomb King themed area and RvR dungeon will be made available to our players as planned.

With respect to customer service, quality assurance and play testing, prior to the launch of WAR, we hired additional people to deal with the rush of demand associated with an MMO launch and to insure the best possible experience for our players. We accomplished that goal and as a result we had the smoothest-ever launch of a major MMO. Since the launch last year, the demand for customer service has gone down as players become more familiar with the game. Obviously, demand for a large QA and play-testing staff also falls after launch. As a result, we saw a staff reduction which is in line with the company-wide initiative. In no way does this conflict with our commitment to customer service. Staffing numbers will always map to consumer needs – it goes up when we launch new products and expand popular ones, and comes back down as players become familiar with the game.

Although we now have fewer developers on the game than we did leading up to the launch, WAR still has a larger dev team today than we ever had for Dark Age of Camelot. At Mythic, we’re committed to maintaining the trust of WAR players – we’re going to deliver the content and service that keeps you playing.

It is unlikely that 500k or even 1 million subscriptions would have saved all these jobs. More importantly, what Mark Jacobs doesn't divulge is that important personnel from community management, programmers and developers lost their jobs. Good hard-working and very loyal people. Jacobs is downplaying the churn as normalcy due to pre-launch resources versus post-launch. It's a bit slimy, but his assuage is understandable to help prevent the panic but nonetheless it is insulting to hide the truth. This isn't the first time layoffs have hit Mythic Entertainment and more than likely that is when most of that fat in the QA department was trimmed down.

As for cold hard numbers on how many jobs were cut, sources inside estimate anywhere from 60 to 130 were let go. With a new mandate in hand and one that demands a change in direction this huge cutback might not bode well for Warhammer Online's future. The a Call to Arms live expansion begins later this month with content updates staggered out. Hopefully there's enough staff still employed to pull it off.