I don’t really have an opinion on lay-offs as a whole because I’m sure the reasons and methods vary greatly from company to company. But the game industry seems to have trouble figuring out what the best employment models are, since it is unlike any other industry, including films.

This round is deep and wide. It does not seem like normal shuffling to me, I think it’s ridiculous to call it that. There’s a big stack of resumes floating around in the industry this month.

The Elder Scrolls series is a good example. Between Elder Scrolls 3 (original PC release May 1, 2002) and Elder Scrolls 4 (March 20, 2006) you will see that the only name (practically) that’s the same between the two games is Todd Howard (Project Leader) and Ken Rolston (Lead Designer).

Most of the devs at Bethesda were let go or went on to other companies to work on other projects instead of staying on for Oblivion even though Morrowind was wildly successful and put Bethesda back on the map.

The mentality of game development has always been that when a project is completed you move onto something else and go to a different company. Only the lead designers and big name programmers typically stay behind.

MMOs are a rather recent development and offer a unique opportunity for retention. But it can take hundreds of people to development a game- especially one as big in scope as an MMORPG- but it only really takes a few dozen (besides CS staff) to maintain the game programatically and supply new small-scale content on a regular basis.

I think it’s rational and logical that Mythic let people go, that game studios everywhere let people go. It does suck, but it’s also the nature of the beast. The good news is that gaming continues to grow as an industry, and despite the economic downturns there are still a wealth of positions opening up across the board.

Seriously though, game developers can be among the most passionate people around and yet their profession is so risky because of factors like competition and development costs. In a perfect world, they could fun their own startups without having to answer to and be screwed over by “the man.”

@Rog: I mostly agree with your reactions.

@Jeremy Preacher: If you read some of the comments of those posts, Sanya seems to say that EA’s “good practices” seemed to have been bleeding in to Mythic after Mythic was bought. Maybe I read it wrong?

You don’t hire and lay off temporary employees to help with a push. You hire contractors who know there is a limited work term. If you hire people without letting them know it’s “just short term for the release” then it isn’t a “lay off” it’s a contract.

If you knew it was going to be temporary and they weren’t told that? Well, that’s just shitty.

Either way, it’s full of shit.

VERY rarely will you see any Low or Mid-level employee stay with a studio, MMO or not, longer then 2 or 3 years.

Big names stay, the rest of us move on to a new city to get a new chance with a new startup.

Software-wise, most IT companies will create one main product and once it ships, they move to support and upgrades.

Game companies are studios, which create titles. This is why most emerging game studios will actually grow when they ship a title, because they actually need more people because they’re adding support, but development does not decline.

MMOs could probably fit a bit more into the IT model, but given the legacy of the industry they’re more likely to stick with the studio model and develop large (hopefully, lol) expansions.

As for the age of the companies themselves, both EA and Mythic (depending on how you count the company iterations) have been around since the 80′s.

EA has been running through their plans for layoffs in multiple departments and studios, they’ve been clear-cutting to match shareholder expectations. It’s absurd to think that Mythic’s portion of the cuts were precsion and based on pre-planned launch strategy.

These kind of cuts are not standard fare, good grief this is a recent trend. Apologies to CaesarsGhost and Melf_Himself above but “makes sense” seems to me you bought into the BS press release. It’s meant to sound reasonable, but it’s PR and image. EA needs to sell themselves as an agile corporation right now.

Since when does a game launch and you let people go? That’s a pretty freaking new concept to me. Decades in the industry and generally I’ve seen teams get axed if game is either a disastrous mess (Age of Conan), a huge financial loss (Tabula Rasa), or they’ve just plain run out of operating funds (at EA? um, no). Generally it’s wait and see how well the game does and the potential for the next one. They shuffle a few people around on teams and get back to making the next game, or in the case of MMOs making ongoing content + expansion(s).

And I’m not just talking about the layoffs at Mythic, I’m talking the scorched earth that just went through Black Box and other successful studios too. Commenting on the cuts at Mythic as if they’re an island, well it’s missing a big part of the picture.

WAR may not have done as well as they’d hoped, but I doubt it’s unprofitable at 300k subs. You don’t start bleeding developer talent out of a studio that’s turning a profit, that’s not normal operations. So look at the other reasons.