CCP To Lay Off 20% Of Staff
In completely expected news, CCP today announced they are laying off around 20% of staff mainly from the World of Darkness project.
The key point in this press release is below:
For the immediate future, our mission is to enrich the vast EVE Universe by strengthening the continuous development of EVE Online while preparing to bring DUST 514 to market on the PS3. We do this in order to realize our ambitious and challenging plan of joining the two in a cross-platform, truly massive online world.
World of Darkness will continue development with a significantly reduced team. This team will continue to iterate and expand on the gameplay and systems they have designed. We will also redeploy creative teams in Atlanta to support the launch of DUST 514.
I can only hope CCP's senior management will take the hint from the flat-lined player count and drop the WoD and DUST514 projects entirely.
3 comments
To be honest, I don't think laying off staff from WoD was the answer. They should repurpose them towards their other projects and either shelve WoD for now or drop it entirely, have the current WoD staff be regeared towards Incarna/DUST if they really want to keep working on that and the rest of the development teams work on FiS. So unless the flatlined sub count actually cut into their profit enough to lay off a full 5th of their workforce, this seems like a strange move to me.
A far more likely scenario than the one above is they are tidying up their books before attempting to redo their corporate debt situation.
I don't think they can drop Dust, even if they wanted to ( which I don't believe either ). There has been too much PR already for it - at minimum, I imagine penalty clauses in the contracts with Sony.
And call me crazy, but I don't think they should drop WoD completely. Shelve it for a while, yes, but not drop it. The true WoD is a universe as harsh and unforgiving as EVE is - it'd be a shame if MMOizing it isn't even tried.