EA Australia and ArenaNet Hit With Significant Layoffs

AlphaAtlas

AlphaAtlas

[H]ard|Gawd
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Apparently, its layoff season in the gaming industry. Activision-Blizzard let hundreds of employees go earlier this month, and now, gamesindustry.biz reports that EA and ArenaNet are losing a significant number of employees as well. EA Australia is behind a number of (relatively) high profile mobile titles like Real Racing 3, The Sims and Need for Speed: No Limits, but the studio is reportedly "being refocused on live services" after they lose about a quarter of their staff, and a Kotaku source thinks that it could lead to a studio shutdown. Meanwhile, ArenaNet, who's best known for developing and maintaining Guild Wars 2, told gamesindustry.biz "We can confirm that due to the cancellation of unannounced projects, ArenaNet will make staff reductions," and said "this is part of a larger organizational restructuring within NCSOFT in the west, but the Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 game services will not be affected, nor is any upcoming game content canceled."

Per the source, an email was sent to employees earlier today from ArenaNet parent company NCSoft's CEO Songyee Yoon. "Our live game business revenue is declining as our franchises age, delays in development on PC and mobile have created further drains against our revenue projects, while our operating costs in the west have increased," it reads. "Where we are is not sustainable, and is not going to set us up for future success..." Former Guild Wars 2 writer Jessica Price (who was controversially let go last year following a Twitter exchange) said the layoffs were "not surprising" and added detail on other projects going on behind the scenes at the company as of last year. "[ArenaNet] had two major projects in the works when I was there. One was indefinitely suspended while I was still there. For those of us working on GW2, our mandate was essentially to make it look like there was the same level of resources devoted to GW2, when they were actually steadily moving people off of it onto the other projects.
 
Sounds like a great time for some of these people to join together and create a new studio and get back to creating good games without predatory mtx schemes...
 
HVAC said:
Maybe they just need to learn to co..... uh ....... erm ........... nevermind.
Click to expand...
The joke kind of applies. The game runs like absolute dog shit anymore because it practically makes no use of multithreading and runs on old DX9 I believe. They keep throwing more and more graphical content in an old and busted engine, and you have to just accept that no matter your machine, you're going to dwell in 10-15FPS territory during busy areas unless you crank your settings super low and even then, 60FPS is often not obtainable.

Meanwhile a lowly fan recently put out a DX12 wrapper of sorts just to prove the game could be upgraded like that, and sure enough the game runs MUCH smoother with it, albeit with some graphical glitches and risk of crashes. But this goes against the dev's claims of how impossible the task would be.
 
Guildwars 1 had a great arena game. GW2 was a bore to me and lost the soul of the game ... and the battles were a bummer.
 
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