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SOE Layoffs

T

tehslippery

Gawd
Joined
Feb 17, 2012
Messages
833
Between 70-90 people. A lot of CS, especially in the foreign language areas. Raid development team for EQ2 pretty much got axed entirely. The lead raid designer for SOE, Roger Uzun who has been with them since the start (17 years) was amongst those laid off.

If you expected EQNext to have any sort of raiding or end game like that, I told you it wasn't going to happen. Not only do some of the people in charge on that team have a severe dislike of raiding, these layoffs illustrate that the company is going that way in general. EQNext will be about as casual as can be.

http://eq2wire.com/2013/08/28/breaking-soe-layoffs/

http://www.polygon.com/2013/8/28/4669150/job-cuts-at-sony-online-entertainment

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/08/29/john-smedley-takes-to-reddit-to-answer-soe-layoff-questions/

Sorry to hear about those who lost their jobs, I wish you all the best.

Edit: It is funny to hear Smedley talk about how it is so hard to lay off people, when they do it every year like clockwork.
 
Smed may be a gamer, but he's the best example of corporate scum ruining MMO's.
 
It seems like this round was especially targeted at lowering average wage and a lot of the longer time higher paid employees are the ones that got let go.
 
tehslippery said:
Between 70-90 people. A lot of CS, especially in the foreign language areas. Raid development team for EQ2 pretty much got axed entirely. The lead raid designer for SOE, Roger Uzun who has been with them since the start (17 years) was amongst those laid off.

If you expected EQNext to have any sort of raiding or end game like that, I told you it wasn't going to happen. Not only do some of the people in charge on that team have a severe dislike of raiding, these layoffs illustrate that the company is going that way in general. EQNext will be about as casual as can be.

http://eq2wire.com/2013/08/28/breaking-soe-layoffs/

http://www.polygon.com/2013/8/28/4669150/job-cuts-at-sony-online-entertainment

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/08/29/john-smedley-takes-to-reddit-to-answer-soe-layoff-questions/

Sorry to hear about those who lost their jobs, I wish you all the best.

Edit: It is funny to hear Smedley talk about how it is so hard to lay off people, when they do it every year like clockwork.
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As a formerly rabid player (and raider) of EQ and EQ2, this is sad to see.
 
tehslippery said:
If you expected EQNext to have any sort of raiding or end game like that, I told you it wasn't going to happen. Not only do some of the people in charge on that team have a severe dislike of raiding, these layoffs illustrate that the company is going that way in general. EQNext will be about as casual as can be.
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Not that I agree with their decisions 100%, but...I don't think there is enough of a crowd to fund an mmo anymore if all they focused on was hardcore endgame raiding.

People have to remember that the whole reason the "other" mmo is so successful and big is that it is geared towards casual low end play.

I mean if I was going to go through all the work to create something, I would want to create it for the largest most widespread consumer base I could. Would you rather make something and sell it to 10,000 high end consumers? or would you rather do something middle of the road that you can sell to 1,000,000 customers?
 
CannibalTrout said:
Not that I agree with their decisions 100%, but...I don't think there is enough of a crowd to fund an mmo anymore if all they focused on was hardcore endgame raiding.

People have to remember that the whole reason the "other" mmo is so successful and big is that it is geared towards casual low end play.

I mean if I was going to go through all the work to create something, I would want to create it for the largest most widespread consumer base I could. Would you rather make something and sell it to 10,000 high end consumers? or would you rather do something middle of the road that you can sell to 1,000,000 customers?
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I'd be okay with the removal of hardcore raiding if they were to replace it with a more sandbox system of player generated content: Warhammer did this pretty well, or would have if their servers could have handled it (Capturing Keeps and Guild owned Castles). The other game that did something similar that was a great idea but failed in its implementation was Age of Conan with the building Guild towns and sieging them etc. Something akin to this would be a welcome substitute for end game raiding for me (I have been a pretty hardcore raider in every mmo I played).
 
CannibalTrout said:
Not that I agree with their decisions 100%, but...I don't think there is enough of a crowd to fund an mmo anymore if all they focused on was hardcore endgame raiding.

People have to remember that the whole reason the "other" mmo is so successful and big is that it is geared towards casual low end play.

I mean if I was going to go through all the work to create something, I would want to create it for the largest most widespread consumer base I could. Would you rather make something and sell it to 10,000 high end consumers? or would you rather do something middle of the road that you can sell to 1,000,000 customers?
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Yeah, I do agree with this. MMO is a genre where the number of players is an important factor due to it's reliance on a large active community. No matter how "hardcore" a MMO is, if it only has 10k players it's going to fail. You can't have a MMO experience with only a small group of elite players.

Unlike single player games like Wasteland 2 which stands on it's own, regardless of how many players are playing it.
 
Well with EQNext, the presentation they put out implied that gamers would be creating a huge amount of content.....content that then doesn't need to be made by staff...

So what aside from the game engine (and presumed mountain of microtransactions) do they have their employees for? I was under the impression that if they had the community making the "world" that the dev team would be making the interesting content in between (quests, raiding, depth).

It would be a shame to see EQNext DOA.
You can't have a MMO experience with only a small group of elite players.
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That is exactly what allows EQ1 and LoTRO to stay alive today. A small but focused staff that caters to a small and focused playerbase. And is profitable.
 
SOE is slow to use the player made content in PS2. Which are just cosmetic at this point. I mean we're talking like a camo skin or a helmet..that's all they are letting the players do...and they are very slow to go over them and get them added.

So, I just can't see them being even remotely quick about things that are being added to their world such as structures....I haven't heard anything else so far about player content. But it has to do with loot, NPC spawns, or quests, I REALLY doubt they'd ever get them into the game in any kind of timely manner. Unless they are going to take an entirely different approach with EQN and push player content and let players self monitor. I just don't see it happening if they want their IP to be worth anything at the end of the day.

But Smedley needs to be replaced IMO. SOE is about the only company left that offers any kind of MMO selection, but they are going about it in very annoying ways. Lots of "what the hell were they thinking" decisions in Planetside 2, and that's just their latest MMO.... But it's been a fairly long term pattern for the company, especially in their approach to free 2 play games....trying to monetize too much and forgetting that the game has to be and continue to be fun.

Right now PS2 IMO is riding on a lot of promises of things to come, if those things to come end up being as deluded as their approach to implants... people need to be replaced.

EQN looks fun as a Minecraft type environment, but I haven't seen anything yet that looks like much of a game exists.
 
lilbabycat said:
That is exactly what allows EQ1 and LoTRO to stay alive today. A small but focused staff that caters to a small and focused playerbase. And is profitable.
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Yeah, but no one is going to develop a new MMO specifically aimed at having a small tiny userbase, even if it is profitable (on a lesser scale than a million subscriber design model).

Games like Ultima Online, EQ1, LORTO are still around because yes they do have a profitable userbase (albeit a little small), but more importantly those games were large enough when they first came out, that they recouped the initial investment to create the game. The initial 100s of people involved in making those games are long gone and all that left is a small development staff for patches and expansions.

If SOE planned EQNext in a way that would only attract a tiny user base from the start, it would be a long time before they could turn a profit.

Heck the UO and EQ1 game servers probably run on a single rack in some co location facility and cost practically nothing to run.

*these are just my opinions of course, I'm not part of any mmo development staff, but I've worked in the financial world long enough that it seems logical*
 
lilbabycat said:
That is exactly what allows EQ1 and LoTRO to stay alive today. A small but focused staff that caters to a small and focused playerbase. And is profitable.
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Except Turbine has completely alienated the hardcore crowd in the last year. They made raiding cheese easy and said fuck you to PvPers.
 
CannibalTrout said:
Yeah, but no one is going to develop a new MMO specifically aimed at having a small tiny userbase, even if it is profitable (on a lesser scale than a million subscriber design model).

Games like Ultima Online, EQ1, LORTO are still around because yes they do have a profitable userbase (albeit a little small), but more importantly those games were large enough when they first came out, that they recouped the initial investment to create the game. The initial 100s of people involved in making those games are long gone and all that left is a small development staff for patches and expansions.

If SOE planned EQNext in a way that would only attract a tiny user base from the start, it would be a long time before they could turn a profit.

Heck the UO and EQ1 game servers probably run on a single rack in some co location facility and cost practically nothing to run.

*these are just my opinions of course, I'm not part of any mmo development staff, but I've worked in the financial world long enough that it seems logical*
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It's not about planning it to be small, it's about planning to ensure people have something to do at the end of the day that keeps them playing. How many MMO's have been dead within months because there was no end game? I always see people craving a hardcore MMO that just isn't going to happen, and a lot of people looked to EQNext for that hope. I think if you have that hope your best bet is either going to be FFIV or Wildstar.

SOE has been notorious for launching uncomplete games with 0 reason to keep you logging in after you do everything once. They have a ton of MMO's you've never heard of lately that all have the same exact problem. They're banking on the fact that you'll want to try to craft your heart out and spend tons of cash in the marketplace doing it with EQNext.
 
It's kind of funny really, you have SOE Live to get everyone hyped about your games, then you lay a ton of people off so all I hear in the games in extreme negativity
 
Guess this is a confirmation of no raids in EQ Next. Bummer. Can't believe they fired someone that's been there 17 years..

Job security is such a bullshit concept these days.
 
I was never a big raider, but casual massively multilayer is just an oxymoron in my opinion.

What's the point of building a fantasy roleplaying game that doesn't have dozens of players trying to take down the dragon that terrorizes the land?

These companies are building online games that are played like single player games. It just doesn't make sense to me. When I go online to play these games, I expect to play with other gamers. The companies are taking away the content that you consume with other players and giving you no reason but to play by yourself. Why bother being online? I understand that "being online gives you the option to play with others", but this isn't the trend. The trend the past 5-10 years has been further seclusion from one another with growing online solo experiences.
 
tehslippery said:
If you expected EQNext to have any sort of raiding or end game like that, I told you it wasn't going to happen. Not only do some of the people in charge on that team have a severe dislike of raiding, these layoffs illustrate that the company is going that way in general. EQNext will be about as casual as can be.
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The people laid off has absolutely nothing to do with raiding in EQN. I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion, it's a bit of a reach.
 
It's a pretty easy conclusion to come to when almost every single person that had anything to do with raiding in EQ2 was laid off, including Roger Uzun who has been with the company since the beginning and pretty much invented raiding in MMO's. He has been the cornerstone of anything done with raiding in SOE games.

When you combine that with the fact that most of the top people on EQN have a rather intense hate of raiding, it's a rather easy conclusion to come to.
 
tehslippery said:
It's a pretty easy conclusion to come to when almost every single person that had anything to do with raiding in EQ2 was laid off, including Roger Uzun who has been with the company since the beginning and pretty much invented raiding in MMO's. He has been the cornerstone of anything done with raiding in SOE games.

When you combine that with the fact that most of the top people on EQN have a rather intense hate of raiding, it's a rather easy conclusion to come to.
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Again, you're saying a person on a completely different team got laid off, and that will affect raiding in EQN?

Also, do you have a source of someone on EQN saying that they "hate raiding?"
 
You have to know the personnel involved, something you clearly don't.

Roger didn't just do EQ2 raiding. He basically did raiding for the entire company. He started in EQ1 and basically invented raiding as you know it. He did a lot in EQ2, but whenever another game had raid stuff he was involved not just in creating, but in helping/training other developers. It isn't even just him, it was the raid teams in general that got hit extremely hard.

As far as EQN developers hating raiding, again, you have to know them. Domino for example was a player before she was developer. She was extremely vocal about it as a player, and she expressed those things as a developer, and she's not the only one on the team.

It goes beyond that. EQN isn't trying to compete with other SOE games. Taking your own players is self defeating. It's not trying to take away from the Super Hardcore raiding in EQ1, or the more average raiding in EQ2.
 
I don't really see Smed getting excited over another F2P or subscription fantasy MMORPG. It's got to be something completely different than what Brad has done in the past.
 
I was hating Smedley in the late 90s before it became fashionable. Just sayin'.
 
requiem99 said:
I was hating Smedley in the late 90s before it became fashionable. Just sayin'.
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Mine started right in 2004 when he axed Everquest online adventures. They had a expansion 90% complete and cancelled it. they just shut servers down last year. He wouldn't give us what we needed for private servers, wouldn't merge all servers into one. Anything this guy is involved with I am not sure i am willing to put my time into
 
Sony is starting to reap the "benefits" of being a cheap ass company that likes to release fucked up products and then having the balls to call them "next-gen," looking at you PS2. I seriously dont understand how they can release a new engine and have it be dx9, then wonder why people were unhappy with the shitty performance with the mediocre graphics.
 
requiem99 said:
I was hating Smedley in the late 90s before it became fashionable. Just sayin'.
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Tgrove said:
Mine started right in 2004 when he axed Everquest online adventures. They had a expansion 90% complete and cancelled it. they just shut servers down last year. He wouldn't give us what we needed for private servers, wouldn't merge all servers into one. Anything this guy is involved with I am not sure i am willing to put my time into
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There is a project out there called EQClassic, where a team of two guys completely rewrote the server code for 2000 "ish" EQ. The problem is they don't have the rights to legally distribute the client or rights to rebuild the database.

So the lead guy contacted Smed and made him a proposal. The proposal said that he would turn over 100% of revenue to SOE in exchange for the rights to legally run a private EQ server. Smed said no.
 
bigdogchris said:
There is a project out there called EQClassic, where a team of two guys completely rewrote the server code for 2000 "ish" EQ. The problem is they don't have the rights to legally distribute the client or rights to rebuild the database.

So the lead guy contacted Smed and made him a proposal. The proposal said that he would turn over 100% of revenue to SOE in exchange for the rights to legally run a private EQ server. Smed said no.
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Since SOE is still making money on EQ, they had to say no.
 
Litfod said:
Awesome, another Vanguard...
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I love Brad's vision, but I don't understand what has changed that makes him think this time around will be different than VG. Maybe his design for the new product will be smaller and more practical for a niche product.
 
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