Warhammer Online developer Mythic to make major job cuts
DateTime:7/8/2009 5:21:12 PM

As EA cuts back its workforce any developers under its umbrella are going to be affected. One of those is Mythic Entertainment, developer of Warhammer Online.Although we now have fewer developers on the game than we did leading up to the launch, WAR still has a larger dev team today than we ever had for Dark Age of Camelot. At Mythic, we’re committed to maintaining the trust of WAR players – we’re going to deliver the content and service that keeps you playing. If they do lose 130 staff then that’s a significant cut in their team size and must include some key staff on the development team.

Mythic has already made around 20 job cuts, but it is now thought an additional 130 jobs may be about to go. Since the launch last year, the demand for customer service has gone down as players become more familiar with the game. Obviously, demand for a large QA and play-testing staff also falls after launch. As a result, we saw a staff reduction which is in line with the company-wide initiative. In no way does this conflict with our commitment to customer service. Staffing numbers will always map to consumer needs – it goes up when we launch new products and expand popular ones, and comes back down as players become familiar with the game.Current subscriber numbers for the game are around 300,000. That’s a lot of players, but nowhere near enough to even consider this as a challenger to World of Warcraft. If you consider that Warhammer Online had 500,000 players at launch you can see they aren’t growing the market. They can still do that, but new content is key; combined with promotions and advertising – something difficult to pay for at the moment.