So... 200 odd layoffs apparently. Any idea of what the initial “team” size was?
It’s hard to gauge it when you don’t know the exact numbers (and when you know very little about MMO development,) but 200+ sounds pretty devastating for the future of the game, to say the very least.
Sometime it helps to actually follow the link and read what is said there:
"LA Times blog Hero Complex speculates the game cost around $200 million to develop, thanks to its "800 people on four continents" working on the game for around "six years". Included in that are "nearly 1,000 actors" who have voiced-over "4,000 characters in three languages" LA Times blog Hero Complex speculates the game cost around $200 million to develop, thanks to its "800 people on four continents" working on the game for around "six years". Included in that are "nearly 1,000 actors" who have voiced-over "4,000 characters in three languages"
So, if you are thinking SWTOR is BW Austin, you are wrong!
Also you may want to look at the careers on offer by BW and Austin is pretty much just Marketing, QA and the ever required Network Operations (a temp) while Edmonton is actually actively looking for Character, Concept and Environment Artists (even especially for the SW franchise), Animators, Producers, Programmers, etc.
Considering that a) all base material for SWTOR is already pretty much in place - don't expect BW to not recycle textures, models just because every other MMO does it - and b) people are forcing BW to go away from new content and rather want new features, and c) that Edmonton IS BW's home, I would assume that we are looking here is a simple shift, a restructuring for SWTOR regarding its base of operations with Austin becoming maybe more of the administrative side and Edmonton as the "tool box".
Plus, do yourself a favor: google Bioware Galway
See if you find ANY news regarding people being laid off there.
Now consider that a) Galway was created exclusively as a service center for SWTOR (EU), and b) has an estimate staff of 200 people.
Don't you think that IF EA or BW was to cut off SWTOR that cutting down the support staff would also be high on their agenda? I mean why waste money on CSRs when you don't care about customers and are fully aware that the ship is on fire, has sprung a leak, has hit the iceberg, and is made of cardboard anyways, so in short will be a goner shortly? Just to keep up faces? When gamers claim they already know everything?
And believe IF BW was to announce staff being laid off bigtime in Galway, IT WOULD MAKE THE NEWS!
They really screwed up this game by not slowing down the exp. They could have bought themselves so much time if they would have made it so you DIDN'T level out of the content long before you finished the planet. If people were still working on hitting max level.. at least the casual players, they would have been so much better.
Thank you Sir, you just pointed the blame at the right party: the casual gamer! The gamer who needs to feel that he can be one of the "big boys" without having to invest 100s of hours into the game.
But sadly THAT is what MMOs are made for these days. Just look at GW2 where PvE becomes completely optional as in PvP you are fully geared/maxed and in WvW you are out of the door "just" HP maxed, you can easily enough level just being on the Battlegrounds.
TSW also takes away most of the clear "my level is higher than yours so I'll own you" scenario instead the character's progress is just via his progress in the story. (We'll have to see how PvP actually fits into this)
Fact remains that if making your character topdog takes more than 2-4 weeks, it will be considered a grind by most gamers (as sadly the casual gamers are the majority).
Interestingly BW actually put in a solution to this problem: finish your character and then start your alt. Followed by the next. And the next. And the next.
issue is just that BW dropped the ball by not making a bigger "overall-class-quest-complex" i.e. instead of doing generic quests that are open to all 4 classes of a faction (and thereby turn into rinse-repeat once you have done them once) SWTOR should have a set of pure class-storyline quests as well as a (large) range of quests that are exclusively available to individual classes, not all of them. Knowing that they get to play everything new again and not just a few story quests, I bet this would have kept gamers going with alts.
Except of course of those gamers who have no patience for storyline/voice-over quests in the first place and just spacebar thru every dialog. High time that a game designer actually gives out a "reward" for not reading the quest information: Start quest - You take a step - You are dead. - Had you read the quest information you would have known that you should NOT take a step. Please come again.
And of course that some gamers don't even want to see any replay value: "Finished the game once, bring on the next one, no matter how much more stuff there is"
I love how everybody goes like "oooh, EA has fired just about everybody on SWTOR, yeah, just confirms that SWTOR sucks and that EA is just a stupid joke in itself!"
As of right now we have not seen an offical BW or EA statement giving exact numbers!
So that "huge number" of layoffs could turn out to be just 100 guys.
Which one could argue may still be a large number. But what if it's 45 CSRs in the US and 45 CSRs in the EU? How are being let go for potentially a number of reasons including the fact that the Xmas rush is now over and the number of CSR that are required for efficient opperation can be cut by 50%?
Frankly, we are all guessing... except of course about Stephen Reid who has confirmed that he was laid off.
Which may well be considered a sound professional choice.
I mean seriously, would you really leave a guy who only can give 75% at best in his position (and I'm not looking at SR here, just speaking in general) if you can give the same responsibility to a guy who has prooven that he can give 110%?
And yes, there is also the fact that the future course of SWTOR may come into play: 1.2 offered new content, 1.3 doesn't...
IF BW were to re-foucus the devellopment of SWTOR rather on features (as so many people had been crying for) over new content (which was also an issue for other people), it's a bit like having a load of buckets filled with water at hand when the weather has just changed from dry season to wet season: you very likely don't need them! Them obviously being a full content provider team. ;-)
Let's wait and see...
Uh....... you do realize that letting only 100 people go would still be a ton of people right?
Yet you give the case for managed decline, not expansion. When you are trying to manage a decline, yes, you lay off the person who is only giving 75% and keep the person who does 110%. Yet even then Mr. 110% is still overworked, doing all of his work, and some of somebody else's. Under that constraint, you aren't going to expand.
I wouldn't call it "managed decline" - it's simply business smarts: a wheel that doesn't run smooth will potentially hinder your cart more than not having it.
So most smart business managers will try to get rid of those people who fail to deliver to the max. No matter if you are cutting down or are expending. Because what good is a person not giving his all for expending a product? Nothing... unless he was in the wrong position in the first place i.e. should naver have been the designer for the new wiener box but instead has great potential develloping the new flavors for the next wiener products.
You are pretty much saying "BW has cut the fat, no matter if this was done to compensate for losing sub numbers or for other reasons, and in turn they have lost any chance for expansion."
Which in turn means : sometimes, for expansion, you need to bring in new people, no matter if you try to expand your base material (seeing things with new eyes) or if you try to come up with something all new.
I actually don't see this news as doom and gloom for SWTOR, Lots of companies start off with tons of staff then reduce after launch. hell Blizzard layed off people they didn't really need and they have plenty of cash so i don't think it's worth panicking about.
Really does suck for those that did get let go...i really hate EA lol
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand." - Lewis Thomas
Sorry but I just cannot get past the 8.7 rating this game received.
~shakes head~
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
$200 million in the bag and the 1st announcement is that the game is not their #1,2,3,4 or 5th priority (last week), http://tor-talk.com/storm-preparation/ layoffs and now voluntary server moves (server merges...) this week. Taken individually, it may not be a big thing, but add it all up and it is going to be another back shelf game for a company that has already moved on and forgotten about the game, fans and subscribers. This is the beginning of a death spiral for this game, voluntary will become mandatory, updates will quickly be reduced to 1 or 2 major ones a year, F2P will extend the games life for a while. It may in the long run survive, but nothing like it was envisioned.
Sadly game update 1.2 was nothing more than some perks added to get the player base to play thru the content again. Now 1.3 is just simply trying to stop the bleeding and get the few of us remaining players together enough to do multiplayer content. It's really a shame I like this game, but I also like MMO's and this isn't one anymore. I haven't been able to buy a group since Diablo was released. I now wish I sped thru the content so I could have at least got to do all the FP's and Heroics. Hard to do Heroics when there is only 5 people on a planet for 12 hours. If this game has any chance of making it a calender year they must address getting the player base together ASAP!!! That's what people pay the damn money for is to play with and against other players. They must also actually add some new content and not this fluff BS. New worlds, missions, quests, up the level cap whatever it takes. This game could be great if it was handled right. However I'm kind of offended by the fact the devs tried to pass off the legacy system as a big update and ground breaking. Nothing special about it honestly. They just blew smoke up our ass' I hardly call adding a group finder and gathering your spread out player base together a large exciting update either. It should be called trying to save the ship before it sinks.
I feel bad for thinking this. I really do. I want to see everyone do well. However, I'm glad SWTOR is becoming the laughing stock of MMOs. Maybe now future games will actually start to think, "You know what? Maybe we need to think of something new."
I don't want anyone to lose their jobs, though.
This game is just not built to retain interest. There have been countless threads pre-development on their forums and they all went completely ignored.
You want a single-player story? Okay. It's worth 50 bucks. No doubt about that. But a monthly fee? Not even close.
It would've been worth a monthly fee had they included social elements, e.g., larger worlds fit for housing and guild structures, a true world pvp conflict between light and dark, incentives to dwell in all areas of the game (no need to go to tattooine after you leveled through it etc), deep space content etc.
As of now, you are paying monthly to play KoTOR 1 & 2. What did they think was going to happen? I cannot believe how stupid their team was/is. Worst planning EVER.
I can almost hear them all thinking "Warzones will keep them occupied."
Get out of my head! XD
Really, I feel and think ecactly all the same.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Agree completely with OP. This is the worst message they could send. Especially because game is still making ENOUGH money so there is i'm sure absolutely no need for this layoffs. They could have and I'm sure will have more bad financial impact then doubling team. But this is capitalism ... one never have enough of money no matter what.
I really hope swtor stay for long ... so far is my best game ever, playing since day 1 and enjoying every single day and minute since then.
It's always a shame to see people lose their job. For some, it may be easy to forget that these games are actual software projects with livelihoods behind them. I fear for the subscribers and the amount/quality of content they will receive. I hope this doesn't become an orphaned game, but it looks as if turbulent times are ahead for it. Hopefully with the failure of SWTOR (if you can even call it that) we will see less studios entering the MMO market like lemmings over a cliff and see some more planning and innovation.
I feel bad for thinking this. I really do. I want to see everyone do well. However, I'm glad SWTOR is becoming the laughing stock of MMOs. Maybe now future games will actually start to think, "You know what? Maybe we need to think of something new."
I don't want anyone to lose their jobs, though.
This game is just not built to retain interest. There have been countless threads pre-development on their forums and they all went completely ignored.
You want a single-player story? Okay. It's worth 50 bucks. No doubt about that. But a monthly fee? Not even close.
It would've been worth a monthly fee had they included social elements, e.g., larger worlds fit for housing and guild structures, a true world pvp conflict between light and dark, incentives to dwell in all areas of the game (no need to go to tattooine after you leveled through it etc), deep space content etc.
As of now, you are paying monthly to play KoTOR 1 & 2. What did they think was going to happen? I cannot believe how stupid their team was/is. Worst planning EVER.
I can almost hear them all thinking "Warzones will keep them occupied."
I kind of agree with you.
I know many guys on the CS side of things having been there myself leaving just before launch and it would be a damn shame to see a great bnch of guys lose their jobs.
SWTOR was the big boy with the big budget and I guess deep down a lot are just begging it to fail to once and for all send that message that we do not want simplistic PVE games and 2 faction arena PVP, WOW introduced a lot of kids to the genre those same kids are now maturing adults and are after a bigger better more complex challenge. Kids when 3 play with Duplo whenthey are 6 its Lego by 9 Meccano.
A users tastes change and the industry has to grow with it. I strongly believe the MMO genre has about as much of th emarket as it is going to capture and has already captured its golden generation those who joined within the first decade. The kids below the WOW generation don't want MMO's they are COD/BF3 casual game fanbois and will continue along those genre paths.
Sadly game update 1.2 was nothing more than some perks added to get the player base to play thru the content again. Now 1.3 is just simply trying to stop the bleeding and get the few of us remaining players together enough to do multiplayer content. It's really a shame I like this game, but I also like MMO's and this isn't one anymore. I haven't been able to buy a group since Diablo was released. I now wish I sped thru the content so I could have at least got to do all the FP's and Heroics. Hard to do Heroics when there is only 5 people on a planet for 12 hours. If this game has any chance of making it a calender year they must address getting the player base together ASAP!!! That's what people pay the damn money for is to play with and against other players. They must also actually add some new content and not this fluff BS. New worlds, missions, quests, up the level cap whatever it takes. This game could be great if it was handled right. However I'm kind of offended by the fact the devs tried to pass off the legacy system as a big update and ground breaking. Nothing special about it honestly. They just blew smoke up our ass' I hardly call adding a group finder and gathering your spread out player base together a large exciting update either. It should be called trying to save the ship before it sinks.
Diablo has been like a sword to the heart of Red Eclipse what was the only HIGH EU PVE server up until release now it takes at least 30 minutes for a 1-49 warzone to pop, best of luck getting any normal flashpoint group, I spent 2 hours trying to get a group for hammer station last night and by the time I gave up was jsut mysel (tank) random (healer) Yes we couldnt even fill 2 DPS slots.
It tickles me that fans of SWTOR didnt see this coming. The whole thing was a terrible idea from the beginning and everyone else have been saying that for ages now. When you develope a game like this with the kind of money that was kicked into it, there is also a lot of those nervous people that are called investors, when you invest money into a project this size you expect not just to break even but to make money off of your investment, this is perfectly fair and a fairly common way of doing business but it doesnt fit well into the perspective of the gamers.
"Well you are breaking even arent you?" come on people dont be naive, if all games were pitched with the promise of "breaking even" there wouldnt be MMOs.
They spent 200-300 million on this game people, they did manage a whooping 1.9 million subscribers which would have been great if the game actually had enough content to retain and grow that number, it didnt have that. So its no surprise that EA is pulling out faster than a drunk guy in an extremely ugly wench.
Bottomline, the money is what killed the game. When you make a game with this kind of money you have to be conservative, you need a design for the masses but you have to understand that when you make a game which is essentially like a pop song, people are going to get sick of it fairly quickly and you will need more CONTENT to keep the masses entertained. I think this infamous quote says it all:
"It [World of Warcraft] is a touchstone. It has established standards, it's established how you play an MMO. Every MMO that comes out, I play and look at it. And if they break any of the WoW rules, in my book that's pretty dumb."
-Greg Z of BioWare, a man living in a cave, somewhere in Azeroth.
No innovation, too little content and too much bloody money.
SWTOR was the big boy with the big budget and I guess deep down a lot are just begging it to fail to once and for all send that message that we do not want simplistic PVE games and 2 faction arena PVP, WOW introduced a lot of kids to the genre those same kids are now maturing adults and are after a bigger better more complex challenge. Kids when 3 play with Duplo whenthey are 6 its Lego by 9 Meccano.
A users tastes change and the industry has to grow with it. I strongly believe the MMO genre has about as much of th emarket as it is going to capture and has already captured its golden generation those who joined within the first decade. The kids below the WOW generation don't want MMO's they are COD/BF3 casual game fanbois and will continue along those genre paths.
Love your take on things, wish I could completely agree with it ;-)
I'm Pre-WoW, for me grinding thru a long, slow progression of (fun) adventures to get to the next level was the norm.
Now I see this: "Level me up as quick and fast as possible so that I get straightaway to "endgame" and have fun there!"
Which is not just the attitude of gamers new (last 1-2 years) to MMO but for all the generation that came with WoW it seems.
Which has been 7+ years now. Don't really see how you are saying that they have grown from lego to meccano. (I'll leave duplo for the FPS kids)
Rather it seems like they don't want their lego to be a police care made of 12 bocks but to be a full model of a scale Death Star with all the whistles and bells including cell blocks, garbage disposal, landing bay, etc.
You are saying that finally a message will be sent that you don't want "simplistic PvE and 2 faction arena PvP"... yeah... and yet... still Aika (which features a 5 faction system with castle siege and relic war and battlefields and altar war) is not at the top of everybody's radar... despite having been around for a few years... because it's F2P?
And BW actually managed to not just take PvE away from mindless monster bashing by actually sugarcoated it into a storyline (which most WoW age kids just spacebarred thru) with exceptionally high production value but actually made it an individual experience for each character (to some degree).
Frankly, what you are showing me is nothing but the simple fact that today's MMO gamer (WoW+) are really just fed up with the candy that they've had over the last 7 years and now want... candy... just different... you know like not gummibears and chocodrops, like sour gummibears and chocodrops with mint flavor...
You wanna bet how quickly those very same (then obviously further "matured") MMO gamers will leave what's today's (or tomorrow's) next big thing looking for the next bigger thing to come after that?
I love how everybody goes like "oooh, EA has fired just about everybody on SWTOR, yeah, just confirms that SWTOR sucks and that EA is just a stupid joke in itself!"
As of right now we have not seen an offical BW or EA statement giving exact numbers!
So that "huge number" of layoffs could turn out to be just 100 guys.
Which one could argue may still be a large number. But what if it's 45 CSRs in the US and 45 CSRs in the EU? How are being let go for potentially a number of reasons including the fact that the Xmas rush is now over and the number of CSR that are required for efficient opperation can be cut by 50%?
Frankly, we are all guessing... except of course about Stephen Reid who has confirmed that he was laid off.
Which may well be considered a sound professional choice.
I mean seriously, would you really leave a guy who only can give 75% at best in his position (and I'm not looking at SR here, just speaking in general) if you can give the same responsibility to a guy who has prooven that he can give 110%?
And yes, there is also the fact that the future course of SWTOR may come into play: 1.2 offered new content, 1.3 doesn't...
IF BW were to re-foucus the devellopment of SWTOR rather on features (as so many people had been crying for) over new content (which was also an issue for other people), it's a bit like having a load of buckets filled with water at hand when the weather has just changed from dry season to wet season: you very likely don't need them! Them obviously being a full content provider team. ;-)
Let's wait and see...
appx 200 layoffs of FULL-TIME, non contractual, not TEMP positions, but FULL TIME employees laid off. these are position that I would hope it goes without saying that would still be still staffed if the game were living up to expectations. EA/bioware would have filled said positions as TEMP or for a specified contracted period so as to avoid having to benefit severance packages if the intention was to let them go after the dev and 6 month time period after launch expired.
Also, there is no "guessing" going on here -- just alot of you trying to run people in circles as you try and argue semantics. Facts are facts. Accept this situation for what it truly is and stop posting your nonsense as if we are too ignorant to see it for what it is -- you reek of desperation.
SWTOR was the big boy with the big budget and I guess deep down a lot are just begging it to fail to once and for all send that message that we do not want simplistic PVE games and 2 faction arena PVP, WOW introduced a lot of kids to the genre those same kids are now maturing adults and are after a bigger better more complex challenge. Kids when 3 play with Duplo whenthey are 6 its Lego by 9 Meccano.
A users tastes change and the industry has to grow with it. I strongly believe the MMO genre has about as much of th emarket as it is going to capture and has already captured its golden generation those who joined within the first decade. The kids below the WOW generation don't want MMO's they are COD/BF3 casual game fanbois and will continue along those genre paths.
Love your take on things, wish I could completely agree with it ;-)
I'm Pre-WoW, for me grinding thru a long, slow progression of (fun) adventures to get to the next level was the norm.
Now I see this: "Level me up as quick and fast as possible so that I get straightaway to "endgame" and have fun there!"
Which is not just the attitude of gamers new (last 1-2 years) to MMO but for all the generation that came with WoW it seems.
Which has been 7+ years now. Don't really see how you are saying that they have grown from lego to meccano. (I'll leave duplo for the FPS kids)
Rather it seems like they don't want their lego to be a police care made of 12 bocks but to be a full model of a scale Death Star with all the whistles and bells including cell blocks, garbage disposal, landing bay, etc.
You are saying that finally a message will be sent that you don't want "simplistic PvE and 2 faction arena PvP"... yeah... and yet... still Aika (which features a 5 faction system with castle siege and relic war and battlefields and altar war) is not at the top of everybody's radar... despite having been around for a few years... because it's F2P?
And BW actually managed to not just take PvE away from mindless monster bashing by actually sugarcoated it into a storyline (which most WoW age kids just spacebarred thru) with exceptionally high production value but actually made it an individual experience for each character (to some degree).
Frankly, what you are showing me is nothing but the simple fact that today's MMO gamer (WoW+) are really just fed up with the candy that they've had over the last 7 years and now want... candy... just different... you know like not gummibears and chocodrops, like sour gummibears and chocodrops with mint flavor...
You wanna bet how quickly those very same (then obviously further "matured") MMO gamers will leave what's today's (or tomorrow's) next big thing looking for the next bigger thing to come after that?
I sincerly doubt that todays generation of gamers are any less interested in MMOs. Infact during the Wow golden era I think the average age of the players went down, which is consistent with blizzards shift towards less challenging gameplay, I think that came as a result. I also think that the dumbing down alienated a lot of core fans of blizzard, so that today we have gamers... like me! who wont go near themepark games with a tenfoot pole.
Instead I think that the last couple of years the market has been saturated with the same blends. The market for themepark games is still there, thers just not quite room for a game with 200+ mill. dollar pricetag.
I feel BW is doing to little to keep me as a customer. They should forget the lay offs and put them to work balancing the game and the factions. I am sick of going into open world PvP and it being 1/3 - 1/4 republic vrs empire. Sick of abilities being unblanced. Sith skills being insta cast run and gun and the mirrored skill for the Jedi I have to stand still to cast and I have to wait for the animations to catch up before it does damage. How can mirriored classes be so badly balance? If they dont have their act together long before GW2 release I wont come back to try anything. Even if they become top dog MMO. Well maybe if they pick up GW2 model of no subs. Sad thing is if they fix what important before GW2 comes out I wont even go play that game. Thats how badly I want a Star Wars MMO. BLAH!!!!!
Signing onto a game where there are max 6 other players and most times less feels like a single player game without the ability to advance. Without people there is no market to upgrade gear, etc. Why they didnt prepare for server merges while building the game now its getting too late. People are dropping off while they are scrambling to plumb the code in a way that if stubbed in the first place would have taken place already. While they lose poplulation to other mmos how the hell are they going to attract them back? Lot of good ones out there now and they copied the best gameplay of swtor anyway.
This post is intentionally written as to not make any sense what so ever. Thank You Very Much.
"Most of all? The human bit of it just plain sucks. Whatever your feelings are about Star Wars: The Old Republic, a number of people lost their jobs yesterday, and I’d like to end this column by personally wishing them all the best of luck in wherever life takes them from here. I hope you all will, too."
If nothing else, I completely agree with this. As far as what they're offering NOW, it should have been something they planned on implementing from the get-go, and their utter refusal to accept the idea of a Group Finder feature early on killed their chances of garnering new subscribers months ago.
So many of my friends asked me if the game had a Group Finding feature yet, because they had shunned SW:TOR for the very fact that it didn't offer one to begin with, and all I could say was, "No."
Whatever the case, this spells bad news for not just ToR but all of the EA BW games. Too many people are losing their jobs nowadays. I wonder if it really is due to a drop in sub numbers or something else. I can't believe that it is just sub numbers in ToR that would cause this. After all, they have tons of other games out too, such as ME3 that just got released. Didn't that sell well?
Hopefully those responsible for the whole lets copy wow approach are getting fired. Although I bet its not. The usurpers will keep their large paychecks and bonuses for delivering fail and those who actually tried to make the game less total shit get the ass. I hate EA.
Comments
Considering they mentioned the upcoming LFG tool late February and it's 6 weeks since update 1.2, I think development is so slow on this game.
If a team was working on LFG only since 1.2 and they're yet to set a release date, what hope does the game have when they're trimming staff already?
Sometime it helps to actually follow the link and read what is said there:
"LA Times blog Hero Complex speculates the game cost around $200 million to develop, thanks to its "800 people on four continents" working on the game for around "six years". Included in that are "nearly 1,000 actors" who have voiced-over "4,000 characters in three languages" LA Times blog Hero Complex speculates the game cost around $200 million to develop, thanks to its "800 people on four continents" working on the game for around "six years". Included in that are "nearly 1,000 actors" who have voiced-over "4,000 characters in three languages"
So, if you are thinking SWTOR is BW Austin, you are wrong!
Also you may want to look at the careers on offer by BW and Austin is pretty much just Marketing, QA and the ever required Network Operations (a temp) while Edmonton is actually actively looking for Character, Concept and Environment Artists (even especially for the SW franchise), Animators, Producers, Programmers, etc.
Considering that a) all base material for SWTOR is already pretty much in place - don't expect BW to not recycle textures, models just because every other MMO does it - and b) people are forcing BW to go away from new content and rather want new features, and c) that Edmonton IS BW's home, I would assume that we are looking here is a simple shift, a restructuring for SWTOR regarding its base of operations with Austin becoming maybe more of the administrative side and Edmonton as the "tool box".
Plus, do yourself a favor: google Bioware Galway
See if you find ANY news regarding people being laid off there.
Now consider that a) Galway was created exclusively as a service center for SWTOR (EU), and b) has an estimate staff of 200 people.
Don't you think that IF EA or BW was to cut off SWTOR that cutting down the support staff would also be high on their agenda? I mean why waste money on CSRs when you don't care about customers and are fully aware that the ship is on fire, has sprung a leak, has hit the iceberg, and is made of cardboard anyways, so in short will be a goner shortly? Just to keep up faces? When gamers claim they already know everything?
And believe IF BW was to announce staff being laid off bigtime in Galway, IT WOULD MAKE THE NEWS!
Thank you Sir, you just pointed the blame at the right party: the casual gamer! The gamer who needs to feel that he can be one of the "big boys" without having to invest 100s of hours into the game.
But sadly THAT is what MMOs are made for these days. Just look at GW2 where PvE becomes completely optional as in PvP you are fully geared/maxed and in WvW you are out of the door "just" HP maxed, you can easily enough level just being on the Battlegrounds.
TSW also takes away most of the clear "my level is higher than yours so I'll own you" scenario instead the character's progress is just via his progress in the story. (We'll have to see how PvP actually fits into this)
Fact remains that if making your character topdog takes more than 2-4 weeks, it will be considered a grind by most gamers (as sadly the casual gamers are the majority).
Interestingly BW actually put in a solution to this problem: finish your character and then start your alt. Followed by the next. And the next. And the next.
issue is just that BW dropped the ball by not making a bigger "overall-class-quest-complex" i.e. instead of doing generic quests that are open to all 4 classes of a faction (and thereby turn into rinse-repeat once you have done them once) SWTOR should have a set of pure class-storyline quests as well as a (large) range of quests that are exclusively available to individual classes, not all of them. Knowing that they get to play everything new again and not just a few story quests, I bet this would have kept gamers going with alts.
Except of course of those gamers who have no patience for storyline/voice-over quests in the first place and just spacebar thru every dialog. High time that a game designer actually gives out a "reward" for not reading the quest information: Start quest - You take a step - You are dead. - Had you read the quest information you would have known that you should NOT take a step. Please come again.
And of course that some gamers don't even want to see any replay value: "Finished the game once, bring on the next one, no matter how much more stuff there is"
I wouldn't call it "managed decline" - it's simply business smarts: a wheel that doesn't run smooth will potentially hinder your cart more than not having it.
So most smart business managers will try to get rid of those people who fail to deliver to the max. No matter if you are cutting down or are expending. Because what good is a person not giving his all for expending a product? Nothing... unless he was in the wrong position in the first place i.e. should naver have been the designer for the new wiener box but instead has great potential develloping the new flavors for the next wiener products.
You are pretty much saying "BW has cut the fat, no matter if this was done to compensate for losing sub numbers or for other reasons, and in turn they have lost any chance for expansion."
Which in turn means : sometimes, for expansion, you need to bring in new people, no matter if you try to expand your base material (seeing things with new eyes) or if you try to come up with something all new.
im currently subbed for another week or so - spent 15 to punch out warrior story while waiting for tsw,
lucky i was oceanic and got a free transfer-
id be highly surprosed if they dont charge for transfers to generate a little more revenue with all the cancels as of late.
I actually don't see this news as doom and gloom for SWTOR, Lots of companies start off with tons of staff then reduce after launch. hell Blizzard layed off people they didn't really need and they have plenty of cash so i don't think it's worth panicking about.
Really does suck for those that did get let go...i really hate EA lol
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
- Lewis Thomas
Wouldn't hold your breathe.
Sorry but I just cannot get past the 8.7 rating this game received.
~shakes head~
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
$200 million in the bag and the 1st announcement is that the game is not their #1,2,3,4 or 5th priority (last week), http://tor-talk.com/storm-preparation/ layoffs and now voluntary server moves (server merges...) this week. Taken individually, it may not be a big thing, but add it all up and it is going to be another back shelf game for a company that has already moved on and forgotten about the game, fans and subscribers. This is the beginning of a death spiral for this game, voluntary will become mandatory, updates will quickly be reduced to 1 or 2 major ones a year, F2P will extend the games life for a while. It may in the long run survive, but nothing like it was envisioned.
Sadly game update 1.2 was nothing more than some perks added to get the player base to play thru the content again. Now 1.3 is just simply trying to stop the bleeding and get the few of us remaining players together enough to do multiplayer content. It's really a shame I like this game, but I also like MMO's and this isn't one anymore. I haven't been able to buy a group since Diablo was released. I now wish I sped thru the content so I could have at least got to do all the FP's and Heroics. Hard to do Heroics when there is only 5 people on a planet for 12 hours. If this game has any chance of making it a calender year they must address getting the player base together ASAP!!! That's what people pay the damn money for is to play with and against other players. They must also actually add some new content and not this fluff BS. New worlds, missions, quests, up the level cap whatever it takes. This game could be great if it was handled right. However I'm kind of offended by the fact the devs tried to pass off the legacy system as a big update and ground breaking. Nothing special about it honestly. They just blew smoke up our ass' I hardly call adding a group finder and gathering your spread out player base together a large exciting update either. It should be called trying to save the ship before it sinks.
Get out of my head! XD
Really, I feel and think ecactly all the same.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Agree completely with OP. This is the worst message they could send. Especially because game is still making ENOUGH money so there is i'm sure absolutely no need for this layoffs. They could have and I'm sure will have more bad financial impact then doubling team. But this is capitalism ... one never have enough of money no matter what.
I really hope swtor stay for long ... so far is my best game ever, playing since day 1 and enjoying every single day and minute since then.
It's always a shame to see people lose their job. For some, it may be easy to forget that these games are actual software projects with livelihoods behind them. I fear for the subscribers and the amount/quality of content they will receive. I hope this doesn't become an orphaned game, but it looks as if turbulent times are ahead for it. Hopefully with the failure of SWTOR (if you can even call it that) we will see less studios entering the MMO market like lemmings over a cliff and see some more planning and innovation.
I kind of agree with you.
I know many guys on the CS side of things having been there myself leaving just before launch and it would be a damn shame to see a great bnch of guys lose their jobs.
SWTOR was the big boy with the big budget and I guess deep down a lot are just begging it to fail to once and for all send that message that we do not want simplistic PVE games and 2 faction arena PVP, WOW introduced a lot of kids to the genre those same kids are now maturing adults and are after a bigger better more complex challenge. Kids when 3 play with Duplo whenthey are 6 its Lego by 9 Meccano.
A users tastes change and the industry has to grow with it. I strongly believe the MMO genre has about as much of th emarket as it is going to capture and has already captured its golden generation those who joined within the first decade. The kids below the WOW generation don't want MMO's they are COD/BF3 casual game fanbois and will continue along those genre paths.
Diablo has been like a sword to the heart of Red Eclipse what was the only HIGH EU PVE server up until release now it takes at least 30 minutes for a 1-49 warzone to pop, best of luck getting any normal flashpoint group, I spent 2 hours trying to get a group for hammer station last night and by the time I gave up was jsut mysel (tank) random (healer) Yes we couldnt even fill 2 DPS slots.
It tickles me that fans of SWTOR didnt see this coming. The whole thing was a terrible idea from the beginning and everyone else have been saying that for ages now. When you develope a game like this with the kind of money that was kicked into it, there is also a lot of those nervous people that are called investors, when you invest money into a project this size you expect not just to break even but to make money off of your investment, this is perfectly fair and a fairly common way of doing business but it doesnt fit well into the perspective of the gamers.
"Well you are breaking even arent you?" come on people dont be naive, if all games were pitched with the promise of "breaking even" there wouldnt be MMOs.
They spent 200-300 million on this game people, they did manage a whooping 1.9 million subscribers which would have been great if the game actually had enough content to retain and grow that number, it didnt have that. So its no surprise that EA is pulling out faster than a drunk guy in an extremely ugly wench.
Bottomline, the money is what killed the game. When you make a game with this kind of money you have to be conservative, you need a design for the masses but you have to understand that when you make a game which is essentially like a pop song, people are going to get sick of it fairly quickly and you will need more CONTENT to keep the masses entertained. I think this infamous quote says it all:
"It [World of Warcraft] is a touchstone. It has established standards, it's established how you play an MMO. Every MMO that comes out, I play and look at it. And if they break any of the WoW rules, in my book that's pretty dumb."
-Greg Z of BioWare, a man living in a cave, somewhere in Azeroth.
No innovation, too little content and too much bloody money.
Love your take on things, wish I could completely agree with it ;-)
I'm Pre-WoW, for me grinding thru a long, slow progression of (fun) adventures to get to the next level was the norm.
Now I see this: "Level me up as quick and fast as possible so that I get straightaway to "endgame" and have fun there!"
Which is not just the attitude of gamers new (last 1-2 years) to MMO but for all the generation that came with WoW it seems.
Which has been 7+ years now. Don't really see how you are saying that they have grown from lego to meccano. (I'll leave duplo for the FPS kids)
Rather it seems like they don't want their lego to be a police care made of 12 bocks but to be a full model of a scale Death Star with all the whistles and bells including cell blocks, garbage disposal, landing bay, etc.
You are saying that finally a message will be sent that you don't want "simplistic PvE and 2 faction arena PvP"... yeah... and yet... still Aika (which features a 5 faction system with castle siege and relic war and battlefields and altar war) is not at the top of everybody's radar... despite having been around for a few years... because it's F2P?
And BW actually managed to not just take PvE away from mindless monster bashing by actually sugarcoated it into a storyline (which most WoW age kids just spacebarred thru) with exceptionally high production value but actually made it an individual experience for each character (to some degree).
Frankly, what you are showing me is nothing but the simple fact that today's MMO gamer (WoW+) are really just fed up with the candy that they've had over the last 7 years and now want... candy... just different... you know like not gummibears and chocodrops, like sour gummibears and chocodrops with mint flavor...
You wanna bet how quickly those very same (then obviously further "matured") MMO gamers will leave what's today's (or tomorrow's) next big thing looking for the next bigger thing to come after that?
appx 200 layoffs of FULL-TIME, non contractual, not TEMP positions, but FULL TIME employees laid off. these are position that I would hope it goes without saying that would still be still staffed if the game were living up to expectations. EA/bioware would have filled said positions as TEMP or for a specified contracted period so as to avoid having to benefit severance packages if the intention was to let them go after the dev and 6 month time period after launch expired.
Also, there is no "guessing" going on here -- just alot of you trying to run people in circles as you try and argue semantics. Facts are facts. Accept this situation for what it truly is and stop posting your nonsense as if we are too ignorant to see it for what it is -- you reek of desperation.
I sincerly doubt that todays generation of gamers are any less interested in MMOs. Infact during the Wow golden era I think the average age of the players went down, which is consistent with blizzards shift towards less challenging gameplay, I think that came as a result. I also think that the dumbing down alienated a lot of core fans of blizzard, so that today we have gamers... like me! who wont go near themepark games with a tenfoot pole.
Instead I think that the last couple of years the market has been saturated with the same blends. The market for themepark games is still there, thers just not quite room for a game with 200+ mill. dollar pricetag.
I feel BW is doing to little to keep me as a customer. They should forget the lay offs and put them to work balancing the game and the factions. I am sick of going into open world PvP and it being 1/3 - 1/4 republic vrs empire. Sick of abilities being unblanced. Sith skills being insta cast run and gun and the mirrored skill for the Jedi I have to stand still to cast and I have to wait for the animations to catch up before it does damage. How can mirriored classes be so badly balance? If they dont have their act together long before GW2 release I wont come back to try anything. Even if they become top dog MMO. Well maybe if they pick up GW2 model of no subs. Sad thing is if they fix what important before GW2 comes out I wont even go play that game. Thats how badly I want a Star Wars MMO. BLAH!!!!!
More bad news.
http://www.shacknews.com/article/73961/report-average-old-republic-server-has-less-than-350-players
BioWare's rookie attempt at a MMO has definitely gone bad, what will EA do?
A serious management shake-up is going to be needed and EA seems very apathetic towards the whole project.
Unfortunately, I highly doubt that either BioWare or EA will do whats necessary to turn TOR around before its too late.
Signing onto a game where there are max 6 other players and most times less feels like a single player game without the ability to advance. Without people there is no market to upgrade gear, etc. Why they didnt prepare for server merges while building the game now its getting too late. People are dropping off while they are scrambling to plumb the code in a way that if stubbed in the first place would have taken place already. While they lose poplulation to other mmos how the hell are they going to attract them back? Lot of good ones out there now and they copied the best gameplay of swtor anyway.
This post is intentionally written as to not make any sense what so ever. Thank You Very Much.
"Most of all? The human bit of it just plain sucks. Whatever your feelings are about Star Wars: The Old Republic, a number of people lost their jobs yesterday, and I’d like to end this column by personally wishing them all the best of luck in wherever life takes them from here. I hope you all will, too."
If nothing else, I completely agree with this. As far as what they're offering NOW, it should have been something they planned on implementing from the get-go, and their utter refusal to accept the idea of a Group Finder feature early on killed their chances of garnering new subscribers months ago.
So many of my friends asked me if the game had a Group Finding feature yet, because they had shunned SW:TOR for the very fact that it didn't offer one to begin with, and all I could say was, "No."
Whatever the case, this spells bad news for not just ToR but all of the EA BW games. Too many people are losing their jobs nowadays. I wonder if it really is due to a drop in sub numbers or something else. I can't believe that it is just sub numbers in ToR that would cause this. After all, they have tons of other games out too, such as ME3 that just got released. Didn't that sell well?
Playing MUDs and MMOs since 1994.
Hopefully those responsible for the whole lets copy wow approach are getting fired. Although I bet its not. The usurpers will keep their large paychecks and bonuses for delivering fail and those who actually tried to make the game less total shit get the ass. I hate EA.