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Warhammer Team Hit By Layoffs

Posted by Soulskill on from the just-what-every-mmo-needs,-fewer-devs dept.

Zonk notes that Mythic Entertainment, developer of Warhammer Online, is being hit by another round of layoffs. The report estimates that between 60 and 130 staff were let go as part of Electronic Arts' reduction of its workforce. This comes alongside news that the number of Warhammer subscribers has settled to around 300,000. Mythic's Mark Jacobs was quick to affirm that while they were "resizing the team," their plans and schedule are unchanged, citing lower demands on QA now that the launch period has passed. Hopefully this means that their upcoming "live expansion," A Call to Arms, will not be affected by the layoffs.

5 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Reminds me of the joke... by Rollgunner · · Score: 4, Funny

    Lower demands on QA now that the launch period has passed...

    Kinda like the doctor who says:

    I have good news and bad news.
    The bad news is you've lost a lot of blood.
    The good news is you lost an arm and a leg too, so you don't need as much of it.

  2. Let's get one thing straight by Moraelin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I love people like you. You have no clue about the development process at all, and you make far to many assumptions. If a game was released in a shitty state could be because of a bad QA yes, but at the same time they could have found 90% of the issues but due to a set release date or any other sort of pressure from production/development they were punted by programmers/producers to be fixed later. Either way you are too quick to blame one singular entity of the process instead of the whole based purely on what you assume.

    And I love people like you, who are so eager to blame the producer (or anyone else) for not giving a team infinite funds and time.

    The facts are:

    1. The producer isn't some mysterious bogeyman who does nothing but set arbitrary deadlines and stop you from finishing QA. The producer is the guy who pays for the whole development _and_ QA, and each extra month is a month he'll be paying for.

    2. I don't know how you imagine things to be, but any project involves some negotiations. Basically those devs said at some point, "yes, we can do it before date X and with Y million dollars." I'm not aware of any game which was pushed out before the date the devs agreed on. In fact, most blow the deadline and the budget. Some outright lie to get the contract, or are apparently unable to learn from past bad estimates.

    Warhammer Online has been in development longer than WoW IIRC, and it looked so often that it was going nowhere that it was cancelled and then continued after all a couple of times. The first cancelling I remember was in _2004_ FFS. And that's not the _start_ date, it's one of the dates when it wasn't going anwhere.

    And while I have no clue about how it went with the deadlines and budget in the final round, but at the very least, the team delivered less than they promised. See all that cut out content. That's stuff they hadn't just promised their fans, it's stuff they had promised the publisher for that money too. They effectively delivered maybe half the game they had been paid for, or maybe even less.

    3. Most games actually don't even break even as it is. E.g., EA actually subsidizes a heck of a lot of games out of the profits of their sports games and such. I.e., statistically the expectation for any of those games is that it will be yet another hole to throw money down. And digging a bigger hole isn't exactly going to help.

    So, yes, from where I stand it looks to me entirely fair to blame the devs. What do _you_ propose? That the publisher keeps throwing money down a rat hole until the end of times?

    --
    A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
  3. Re:I'm not the prior poster, & I'll this to yo by varcher75 · · Score: 4, Informative
    Troll or ignorance?

    They fuckin' ripped all their IP from Blizzard Entertainment

    The Warcraft line of game was initially intended to be a Warhammer game, but they didn't get the IP. Those guys were around a long time before Blizzard existed. Blizzard's so famous IP is a Warhammer clone.

  4. Re:I'm not the prior poster, & I'll this to yo by Exitar · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/4/10/

  5. I Was A Subscriber... by GaryPatterson · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... but I cancelled a few days ago.

    It wasn't that the game was bad - I liked it and kept my subscription up since release even though I only played it a few times.

    It was that rebooting my MacBook Pro from OS X into Vista became too high a bar for entry. It was just easier to load up WoW than to reboot and play WAR. When you use OS X for everything, and you have to quit all the apps and reboot for a game...

    I wanted to love it. I bought a copy for myself (collector's edition) and a copy for my wife. We played for a few hours in total (I hit level 10!), but in the end, the game did not fit our need for casual gaming.

    We didn't want an easy game or everything handed to us. We just wanted a game that was accessible. Booting to another OS sounds simple (and is) but after a while it becomes too much.

    I'm ready to re-subscribe one day... I did like the game.