Earlier this month, Funcom issued a new round of lay-offs and announced it would be restructuring. The results of its chopping and changing have now been announced, with the Beijing studio closing down entirely now that the developer no longer requires a dedicated asset team for The Secret World.

The Secret World, along with Anarchy Online and Age of Conan, is now the sole province of a studio in Raleigh. This location previously housed Funcom’s customer service and QA teams as well as its operations group, but has extended a welcome to developers, too. The firm hopes this will lead to “a stronger, more unified team that can service and support online games” as well as produce new content entirely in-house.

Meanwhile, Funcom Montreal is making a drastic change, focusing on unannounced products for mobile and tablets, as well as backend work on Funcom’s lauded Dreamworld tech.

Source: VG247

The day before The Secret World went live, Funcom announced that their CEO Trond Aas would be stepping down from the board to serve as “Strategic Advisor to the Board and Chief Strategy Officer”.

This went unremarked at the time with the launch of The Secret World, but it has now come to light that Aas is suspected of having done this in order to remove himself from the “primary insider list” of employees, and thus be able to trade in his Funcom shares without official scrutiny.

Aas reportedly attemped to sell 1.5 million of his shares in Funcom in secret, before being noticed by another stockholder and publicly outed. Funcom’s share prices later tanked on the back of poor sales of The Secret World, tumbling from a high of $17 to the $2 they are worth today.

Although Aas was able to sell 650,000 of his shares, he is now under investigation by the Oslo Stock Exchange and Norway’s Financial Services Authority. Aas insists that he had every reason to believe the game would be a success at the time he sold his shares, and is denying any wrongdoing.

Source: The Escapist

As part of previously-announced “cost adjustment initiatives”, Funcom is looking to cut a large number of jobs. “Funcom is in the process of reducing operational costs and this process includes temporary layoffs as well as other initiatives,” reads a statement purportedly handed to Polygon and later confirmed by Erling Ellingsen.

The number of employees affected was not included as part of the statement, but Polygon is speculating that “up to half” of worldwide employees could be hit by the move, which is part of the moves announced to shareholders on August 10 designed to reduce operating costs.

Source: Polygon