Mythic denies end of WAR is coming

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.