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 cuttingt 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.

Read full article by Matt Warner

Word of today is, "cuttingt".

Normally I'd PM the writer.. but I can't remember your forum nick.

I'm not surprised really. Aside from the lower than expected subscriber base most s/w dev projects I've seen scale down after their major release and leave a bunch of the core people to maintain it.

Spelling error (kind of) downsize not downside.

That there is the most stupidest pile of crap I've ever heard.

You fire your QAs? knowing very well that an expansion is in the works?!?!? WTF!?

Sounds like they're relying more on outsourcing, EA's developers are doing it a lot lately, and as seen as well so are Microsoft's developers.

Very bad idea IMO, would have made more sense to have fired them post Expansion once the work was entirely done OR even put them on Part-Time/Casual and call them in when they are needed again.

They have plenty of testers.. 300K of them.

They're downsizing them, too.

Rofl good call.

Haha, nice one



While the gist of what you're saying about Jacobs' spin is right, he admitted there were now less devs (in the quote you provided):

I like how the guys at the top decide to cut costs by firing a multitude of staff at the bottom, while siphoning as much money as they can into their own pockets with ridiculous packages.