Mythic denies end of WAR is coming

NewsPosted 20/01/2009 - 10:58am GMT

Calls rumour suggesting half the development team let go 'total nonsense'.

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning screenshot

Mythic Entertainment co-founder and general manager Mark Jacobs has responded to recent rumours that the Warhammer Online developer has suffered layoffs, saying the suggestion that the company had lost half the team was "total nonsense".

Late last week Joystiq reported that: "21 customer service employees, half of QA and all of the playtest group were let go."

In a number of forum posts Jacobs addressed the rumour, pointing towards past comments made by EA CEO John Riccitiello. In December last year he revealed the mega-game company was "taking steps to reduce our cost structure and improve the profitability of our business" following disappointing holiday game sales.

Jacobs said: "Our CEO JR has publicly stated the need to cut costs across all of EA. This statement is old news and applies all throughout EA. As part of EA, all studios are expected to do their fair share to meet the expectations of our CEO. It isn't any more complicated than that other than to say that we have a very large studio and pretty much every person there has been and will continue to work on WAR for quite a while (meaning we haven't started work on another game yet). When we launched, we had over 400+ people working on the game in one capacity or another so it's not like we had a small team at launch or even a small team now."

He added: "Oh, and the whole (OMG, we're losing 1/2 the developer (or even of the total team) thing) is total nonsense. This is one of the times I really, really wish I could comment more than I can but if you look at what JR has said in terms of cost cutting, that should give you a good idea about what is happening throughout EA.

"I have a very large team continuing to work on WAR now and going forward and we'll continue to build with that."

Warhammer Online is considered one of EA's successes of 2008. In October it announced the game had 800,000 players, and sales totalled 1.2 million units during the publisher's second fiscal quarter, ended September 30, 2008.

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User Comments

Triggerhappytel @ Bloodstorm

I haven't played it - I don't play PC games (mainly due to ancient hardware), but I've heard it's a solid if unremarkable entry to the genre, which does a few things better than WoW (I'm not even going to start talking about PvP and so on, because I don't even know what that all means!).

Posted 11:30 on 20 January 2009

Bloodstorm

Quick question, is it any good? Have any of you had good experiences with it? I may try it next month when i get paid.

Posted 11:19 on 20 January 2009

Triggerhappytel

This game is unlikely to ever topple WoW, but if they can retain a user base of, say, 500,000 - 1,000,000 then that's a fairly respectable figure, and one that I hope allows the game to stay active. WoW has a choke-hold on the MMO market, but people forget that it didn't get more than 10 million users overnight - it took literally years to reach that figure; I think more competitors need to outlay long-term plans for any new MMOs.

However, I suspect that - in the short term, at least - Star Wars: TOR will be the only MMO which will come close to threatening WoW.

Posted 11:05 on 20 January 2009