Rumors Mass Layoffs To Impact Arenanet / GW2

[NihilSustinet]

A Kotaku post by Jason Schreier claims that NCSoft is in the works of mass layoffs to impact Arenanet

Quote from post: "Songyee Yoon, the CEO of Korean publisher NCSoft West, which owns ArenaNet, e-mailed employees this afternoon with the news. “Our live game business revenue is declining as our franchises age, delays in development on PC and mobile have created further drains against our revenue projects, while our operating costs in the west have increased,” she wrote. “Where we are is not sustainable, and is not going to set us up for future success.”

https://kotaku.com/guild-wars-2-deve...ffs-1832799804

Loved the launch days of Guild Wars 2 personally along several months later then the temporary content updates just got annoying

To add to that Live Service model is showing its problems and considering it feels like 90% games released these days to even years ago is showing instability.... average consumer I expect can only commit to one live service and the market is too saturated to sustain itself

gw2 is still a thing?

[Gray_Matter]

Can't argue with that because thats basically the job of a parent company. When scope creeps up someone has to make the tough calls and right the ship.

It sounds like NCSoft were right in pulling the plug but A/Net was also right in looking to expand into other products. Can you imagine if Apple had stopped at the iPod.

[Svifnymr]

I think it was a on one of the NCsoft earnings calls a quarter or two ago, they mentioned that S4/5 content were in the works. I'll try to dig up a source, but this wasn't an official announcement put out by ANet.

Not sure how I feel about it, I like the episodic content (even if some of the episodes are meh) but the expacs did make nice breaks as well. Ah well, not like I spend a lot on the game anyway.

3:34

Thanks!

[MoanaLisa]

There has to be more to the layoffs then just live services being big right now.

There is. It appears that 2019 is going to be a bad year across the whole industry. So people are getting ready for it. This isn't peculiar to ArenaNet as most everyone knows. Studios and companies will look across their product lines and the ones that aren't producing anything in the way of revenue will be back burnered, tightened up a bit so they can ride things out or closed down.

[LilSaihah]

https://www.mmorpg.com/guild-wars-2/...ing-1000051606

During these meetings, sources said that ArenaNet's Mike O'Brien was grief-stricken. "He kept wandering around just saying we'll get through this" repeatedly.

So it really doesn't seem that MO got much advance warning either. That's horrible.

I really have no idea what to make of this. On the one hand, diverting staff onto other projects which weren't going anywhere seems sensible to me. On the other hand, this is a hell of a lot of senior staff to lose.

[Vyndeleron]

Impacts hitting hard now that layoffs are done

Rough complied list of whos gone over on GW2 reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/..._this_updated/

This indeed affected more than those cancelled unannounced projects... those who happen to know those on list will know how badly GW2 will be affected

100s of 400 were let go... also some things delayed while the studio is temporarily shutdown to deal with the aftermath

[nVIDIA]

God bless acti-bliz, atleast they didn't fire single dev.

[PACOX]

Impacts hitting hard now that layoffs are done

Rough complied list of whos gone over on GW2 reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/..._this_updated/

This indeed affected more than those cancelled unannounced projects... those who happen to know those on list will know how badly GW2 will be affected

100s of 400 were let go... also some things delayed while the studio is temporarily shutdown to deal with the aftermath

Eh we'll see. Anet had a lot of dreamers but not enough producers. Not enough manpower focused on putting out content instead of good vibes. Way too many cooks in the kitchen, not enough food going out.

Don't want to risk becoming one of those studios that drown in its own ideas. See Wildstar, see countless MMOs that people have been waiting for but are still in 'alpha'.

[Unholyground]

Every major Publisher is pushing toward mobile because that is where the money is, however they all seem to be holding into some of their more stable PC/Console franchises to fill in the gaps.

[Tenjen]

This actually looks rather discouraging all around. I'll enjoy the game with my guild for as long as i can though.

[PACOX]

The final number is 143.

Hi everyone,

This past week there have been a lot of questions about the status of Guild Wars 2. I’d like to share with you a little about what’s currently going on at the studio and what it means for the game.

The Guild Wars 2 team is still committed to bringing content and feature updates to the game. The next episodes of Living World are already in development, Swiss tournament support is coming to PvP, we’re looking at more WvW events coming soon, and the return of the Super Adventure Festival is imminent. Our long-term plans for the game like World Restructuring and large-scale improvements to quality of life are still in the works.

The studio has recently been affected by layoffs, which is going to take some time to process. There’s no easy way for any team to adjust to that. We've had to say goodbye to friends and colleagues that we've worked alongside for years. We’re welcoming back some familiar faces to the Guild Wars 2 team that had been working on unannounced projects. After all is said and done, it's going to take some time for us to adjust to our staffing changes.

As the proverbial dust settles in the next few days we're going to re-evaluate our schedules to make sure that our releases are realistic and allow us the time to make sure they hit our internal quality bar. This means that some updates are going to see delays, like the recent Warclaw, as we regain our focus.

I’d like to extend my heartfelt thanks to all of you who have reached out in support of our studio family. Thank you for your patience in this trying time. We’re making every effort to keep things running as smoothly as possible and stay on track with releases. Rest assured that ArenaNet is not done with Guild Wars. And the team is not done with our tale of dragons, or our eternal conflict in the mists. There’s still lots for us to do together.

We’ll see you in Tyria,
z & the Guild Wars 2 Team

Development moves forward, albeit with less side/personal projects. They have about a month and a half worths of patches to hold them down while they iron out a new release cadence. The new cadence will probably be a mix between their intitial one (content every two weeks, unsustainable) and the 3 month one. Probably a delieverable once a month with the bigger pve releases being every 3 months or so.

[Gray_Matter]

The final number is 143.

Development moves forward, albeit with less side/personal projects. They have about a month and a half worths of patches to hold them down while they iron out a new release cadence. The new cadence will probably be a mix between their intitial one (content every two weeks, unsustainable) and the 3 month one. Probably a delieverable once a month with the bigger pve releases being every 3 months or so.

It sounds like they will probably end up with more people on GW2 than before the layoffs which is good for GW2 but not great news for A/Net long term. You can't rely on a single game as a company. It's far too risky.

If you look at the NCSoft results, it's a bit scary how much more mobile games make compared to the rest of their games.

Mobile game sales for the 4th quarter was $198 million. Lineage, Lineage 2, Aion, B&S and GW2 were $100 million combined. I don't even know what mobile games they make. When you go to their US site, you only see the PC games above.

[Edge-]

Mobile game sales for the 4th quarter was $198 million. Lineage, Lineage 2, Aion, B&S and GW2 were $100 million combined. I don't even know what mobile games they make. When you go to their US site, you only see the PC games above.

Most of the mobile games are in Korea, but we do have a Lineage and now Aion mobile game in the west. They've got those plus a few more using those IP's that are eventually coming west.

[Jamie081]

Unless you actively look for news of it when is the last time you saw anyone talking about Guild Wars 2? not to shit on the game but it seems like around the whole 'scarlet briar' period interest in the IP fell off a cliff and not many came back for heart of thorns and since then the games not exactly been showing signs of growth in players and income. Sometimes a game can be perfectly inoffensive and still fail because its interest isn't in the numbers it requires.

Guild Wars 2 is an oddball. The only people talking about the game are the people that play it but they only talk about how amazing it is and ignore its issues, no one listens to them so it comes off as a circle jerk.

I blame their marketing team. They had a new marketing team legit ask the players how they should do their job because every attempt they made just completely missed the mark. It's crazy.

[Edge-]

Guild Wars 2 is an oddball. The only people talking about the game are the people that play it but they only talk about how amazing it is and ignore its issues, no one listens to them so it comes off as a circle jerk.

? I mean their forums are a mess because of how overly moderated they are, but have you been to the reddit? It's definitely more positive/upbeat than a lot of other games, but folks are routinely criticizing and complaining about shit. Hell, the WvW community just threw a fit (not trying to dismiss their concerns) about the cat mount being added to WvW recently and laid into Anet. There have also been plenty of criticisms about the zones added during S4 and the issues they face.

I blame their marketing team. They had a new marketing team legit ask the players how they should do their job because every attempt they made just completely missed the mark. It's crazy.

What? When did this happen?

[Thage]

'Games as Live Service' is a bubble that was always bound to burst sooner than later. Time and money are finite. When every game wants all the time and all the money, inevitably the majority are going to crash and burn, and games redirected to suckle at that depleted teat will similarly crash and burn.

No surprise NCSoft is feeling the impact, NCSoft's got a bad habit of torching thing as soon as the going get tough and moving on to the next project.

[Edge-]

'Games as Live Service' is a bubble that was always bound to burst sooner than later.

I mean, MMO's technically fit into this category but given their existence long before this fresh crop of non-MMO's jumped on I don't consider the two to be directly comparable.

No surprise NCSoft is feeling the impact, NCSoft's got a bad habit of torching thing as soon as the going get tough and moving on to the next project.

This isn't remotely true at all.

Tabula Rasa was a mess, and they fucked up in closing it and ate shit for it.
Auto Assault was so bad and sold so poorly GameStop was literally giving away free copies just to get rid of inventory.
Lineage had been dead for years in the west and nobody really cared when it was shuttered.
CoH was closed after a long life with strong support, the game wasn't going to grow anymore and NCsoft wanted to free up internal resources and market space for the just-launched GW2 and the upcoming launch of WildStar. It sucks for the CoH fans because the game was modestly profitable and had pretty stable revenues, but it's an understandable business move.
WildStar was a complete and total disaster for them but they kept supporting it pretty strongly for years after launch, giving them a proper fully supported F2P relaunch and then even more juice for their Steam launch.

NCsoft closes more games than other publishers (at least in the west) because they release more games than other publishers. If you compare them to companies a bit more like them like Nexon or PWE then NCsoft both releases fewer games and closes down far fewer of them, while giving their titles far stronger support than most of what's in Nexon or PWE's libraries (save for Cryptic's games).

[Puupi]

I tried to go to guildwars2guru.com and it redirected me here, to mmo-champion forums. What the hell? O_o

[Rogalicus]

What? When did this happen?

After this ad became a laughing stock of community.

If you look back at S4 trailers, they kept changing the formula every time, this was based on forum feedback that started after someone from marketing team asked about what they would like to see in ad.

[Valeron]

I tried to go to guildwars2guru.com and it redirected me here, to mmo-champion forums. What the hell? O_o

guru has been dead a long time. I imagine it got redirected here because it was owned by Curse and mmochampion is owned by Curse as well.