Darth Hater

Who was laid off that is directly connected to SWTOR? 

Quote from Jaramukhti »

Who was laid off that is directly connected to SWTOR? 

I could easily imagine that it would be the ME people that got most of that. The ME games are finished, so all those people that were involved that didn't serve a critical function can now easily be laid off with no major consequences. Hopefully they retain the talented people that created most of that project up, but not including, the end.

Also, BioShock Infinite might also be closing down for the personel heavy work.

That doesn't preclude a cut to the TOR crew, but hopefully it has been done with more brains than fears.

The ME games aren't finished by a long shot. Just Shepard's story is.

These developers all talk big about supporting a game for years and then most of them layoff a large portion of their staff a few months after release.  The game then goes on life support for a couple of years until they close the doors.  so much for all the big talk about competing with WoW and an ever-evolving TOR that would be supported for years.  For those that thought it was taking BW too long to fix stuff or get new content/features out the door prior to this announcement get ready to wait even longer (if ever). 

I have no doubt that the people working on the game WANTED to fully support and do their best with this game, but they aren't the folks calling the shots-the bean counters are.  I wonder if the BW bigs are finally lamenting coming into the EA fold with all that entails. 

I swear that I will never again give any mmo more than a month-to-month sub (if that model even exists much longer after this) because these game producers are only in it for the quick return on their "investment". 

Funny thing there, I do remember how BioWare touted at launch how they didn't get rid of any developers(specifically citing how most MMOs fire a lot of devs at release), in fact stating they'd hired MORE people. I guess that "honeymoon" period has ended.

I'm not really being negative, just slightly sad at the news, and pointing out that statement I remembered in relation to your post. I do love TOR.

Quote from RogueJedi86 »

Funny thing there, I do remember how BioWare touted at launch how they didn't get rid of any developers(specifically citing how most MMOs fire a lot of devs at release), in fact stating they'd hired MORE people. I guess that "honeymoon" period has ended.

I'm not really being negative, just slightly sad at the news, and pointing out that statement I remembered in relation to your post. I do love TOR.

@RJ--

This is the post you are looking for:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134940/the_making_of_star_wars_the_old_.php?print=1

"Unlike a lot of other game companies that, once they launch a game, downsize their teams radically, our plan is to keep the team together and continue to focus on building content."

-- James Ohlen

From a purely finacial perspective I can't fault EA/Bioware. Every project has and ROI calculation.  A lot of assumptions go into that calculation (Development cost, Marekting Cost, Subscriptions expected, etc...) A lot of people keep pointing back to the EA Statement that SWTOR is profitable at 500k subscribers, but what they didn't say is over what period of time that covered. In other words how long would they have to maintain 500k subscribers to reach the profitable stage. I doubt that it was only 6 months. If they had 1.3 million subs at the end of Feb, they probably have much less than that at this point. Add into that the additional PVP developement that wasn't budgeted for, what their calculations are of what the subscriber base will be for the remaining fiscal year (The Panda's will come out in the fall and take some amount of subscribers) and they had to re-calculate their ROI and how much more money they were willing to dump into the game this Fiscal Year. Barring a spike in subs that brings in additional money the budget is going to be very tight for SWTOR. From a strictly financial view Bioware is doing what any Publicy Traded company would do. They are legally obligated to maximize shareholder value.

my dig on EA was more a cautionary statement that i posted long ago about (and at that time i wondered aloud how long it would take the doctors/BW et al to regret the decision to come into the EA fold).  someone on the official forums had a great sig about my meaning.  which is that it might seem attractive to get into EA's deep pockets, but you have to sell your soul (lose control of your company) to do it.  i don't know if BW could've pulled off a mmo on their own, but is this another area where they bit off more than they could chew (and at what price)?  i think the harsh realities of being in bed with EA are hitting home now.  BW will get the brunt of the industry blame when/if TOR fails to have any longevity and EA has been known to breakup previously successful independent companies that were wooed into their fold. 

having said that, i can't blame everything on EA.  TOR definitley has some shining moments, but i had (still do) some big concerns about design decisions in the years i followed the development of this game, thru beta, launch and to where we stand today.  major mismanagement in some crucial areas (social being number 1) to be quite frank.  how do you not budget for pvp in a mmo?  imo, at least 90% of a game's resources should be devoted to player-to-player (which includes pvp) interaction (mmo are social games afterall), as well as being designed/mapped out from an "end game" (level cap) first perspective.  i bring this up because i've been reading a lot of anti-pvp'er posts about them being the cause of TOR's demise ("massive resources rerouted to develop pvp"). 

the fact that this game plays more like a single player rpg than an mmo (and lacking several basic mmo features) is why it's no wonder that the game enjoyed a brief surplus of subs only to lose those subs as fast (or faster) when the story ended.  take my personal experience and feelings about the money i spent on the game.  i feel like i (by and large) got my money's worth of enjoyment (from an rpg PoV) for the first few months, but i'm seriously lamenting my (first time ever) decision to give them a 6-month sub.  this is what i have to look forward to when i log in on any given day:  try to pug an Op or FP (because our little social guild can't muster enough people with lvl 50's) for gear grind, pug 4 WZ maps (because only 1 other buddy is really devoted to pvp) for gear grind, and/or grind dailies for comms/credits.  there's nothing really compelling about any of this (even if i were in a large/organized guild) because it's all about grinding gear.  i'm sorry, but SW the ip isn't about grinding gear (why is the game?).

social games need to have social ramifications that are felt throughout the greater game world for it (the game) to hold people's interest over time.  the basic premise to the entire story is the conflict between the Sith Empire and the Galactic Republic, yet everything in TOR the game is segregated and up til now has little to do with the meta game conflict.  we have two factions that couldn't care less about the "conflict" supposedly between them.  nobody cares about the results of WZ interfaction warfare (when you can get it), because the game doesn't support any kind of socio/economical/political impact as a result.  it's akin to how real war impacted the average citizen up until "total war" became a reality.  anyone who chooses not to partake of pvp is totally unaffected by Faction v Faction.  i get that not everyone has the temperment/desire/whatever to fight against other players for a multitude of reasons but that doesn't mean that they should be allowed to ignore the conflict and not suffer the consequences.  besides, there are other ways a player can support the cause w/o actually fighting other players (if the game supported it).   

I think that part of the problem is allthe bad "press" that the game is getting from the haters. If you take someone fresh that has never played it, but is interested in playing it. Sit them down and tell them all the bad stuff about the game and then sit them infront of the game, they are gonna notice that stuff mainly over anything that is good in the game. It's simple human nature. Yes, there are things that need to be fixed in the game, but we need to get the positive voices louder then the "negative nancys" out there and give people both sides of the story so they can come at it with a far more neutral outlook.

Now I'm also not saying that is the only way to fix things, but I think it is definately part of it. Every MMO that wants to go the distance has a slow/rough start. WoW sucked rocks at first with downtimes and glitches and all sorts of problems. But they kept at it and kept making changes and still keep making changes to make a better game. SWTOR is on the same path, only difference is that WoW didn't really have a HUGE game to be compared to like SWTOR does. It hasn't even been a year people. Let them work out the bugs (learning to deal with the people playing the games, which differs from MMO to MMO) and get the server transfers out and I think we'll start seeing things turning around. I think that their biggest problem overall was launching with too many servers up. This spread people out too thin to start. They should have launched with half the servers with the other servers ready if needed.

If WoW had all the bad press TOR has now when it launched, WoW would've floundered early too, and never gotten the word of mouth to make it the biggest bear in the woods. People these days are just too negative in general, an increasing trend to the embracing of the 4chan-type hater attitudes. The vocal minorities yell loudest, making the happy majority less eager to post in such an environment and making the minority seem bigger than it is, affecting overall perception of games, sinking them.

Quote from RogueJedi86 »

If WoW had all the bad press TOR has now when it launched, WoW would've floundered early too, and never gotten the word of mouth to make it the biggest bear in the woods. People these days are just too negative in general, an increasing trend to the embracing of the 4chan-type hater attitudes. The vocal minorities yell loudest, making the happy majority less eager to post in such an environment and making the minority seem bigger than it is, affecting overall perception of games, sinking them.

@RJ-- That's the nature of their audience though. Gamers are usually very immature. If they dont like a game, they will crucify it for no reason. Look at D3 launch and the metacritic user reviewers. So, Bioware are not being victimized here. Every game dev team has to deal with that level of immaturity. Nobody said it was going to be easy. If they want a patient, matured customer base, they need to stop selling video games. 

I would say BW laying off devs is equally immature. It's a knee jerk reaction from EA in response to them losing 400K subs to pacify their investors -- "look we are still balncing our chequebook by downsizing and reducing operation costs". 

Now is not the time to lay off people. This was the time to invest more into the game.

Releasing a new MMO is like beginning a startup company. You must always plan on the first couple of years to be losses or at best break even. Problem was that EA and their investors were expecting a WoWesque billion dollar smash hit out of the box. So, in the end EA is the one who is so massively immature.

"Do you want to spend the rest of your lives selling sugared water, or do you want to change the world"

-- Steve Jobs.

EA chose to "sell sugared water" through their formula of spewing out iterations of same junk every year. 

Choosing the latter take guts which EA lacks. And hence not everyone becomes a Steve Job. RIP

"The vocal minorities yell loudest, making the happy majority less eager to post in such an environment and making the minority seem bigger than it is, affecting overall perception of games, sinking them."

No, "vocal minorities" are not reponsible for "sinking games", developers/companys/publisher/investors are the ones to "blame".

We did not choose what features the game would and would not deliver when it hit the streets. You are not the one to blame, neither none of those 400.000 players that has left TOR so far. That is why we are not the ones that are being laid off.

The vocal minority isn't directly resposible for the sinking, but they are responsible for less people coming in to offput the sinking. They create an air of negativity that drives away potential customers who just see that everyone online is ragging it as the worst thing ever. So there's no influx of new players to slow the loss of players.

Quote from ChuckNorris »

We did not choose what features the game would and would not deliver when it hit the streets. You are not the one to blame, neither none of those 400.000 players that has left TOR so far. That is why we are not the ones that are being laid off.

Well, you're probably not being laid off because you don't work for them.  You do actually know what "layoffs" are, right?

Players may not have chosen the features, but they can choose how to respond to them.  And the player response to everything in SWTOR was a whole new level of bad.  EVERYTHING was a disaster.  Too few races, too few hairstyles, no logs, too many full servers, too many empty servers, oh-noes-I-have-to-wait-two-days-after-they-let-people-in-worst-launch-EVAR!!  RJ is exactly right - if players had responded to WoW or EQ this way, we wouldn't have an MMO genre at all.  At the rate things are going, we soon won't, because the expectations players have simply aren't realistic, and the massive waves of hate spawned are going to destroy any thought that a company can release a new game to survive in this market.

You cannot choose the features, but you can choose how you respond - and how you respond has consequences.

I'm apalled at all the negativity surrounding this. Is the game perfect? No - it can do things better and given time it will. People are all ready to throw TOR on the fire for being a bad game, but for a dev company to make one from the ground up is not an easy task and they have done quite well.

There are tons of dead MMO's (or near dead) out there that don't have the support that TOR has - and TOR is far from dead. 1.3 million paying subscribers is not a failed game. There are free to play MMO's with less people playing them!

Layoff's and EA go hand in hand. Unfortunatley they are also part of the developement life cycle, but still a sad thing to see happen.  Hard working people are lossing there jobs - NEVER a good thing!