Second round of layoffs

[Hastur242]

Just read on ign second round of layoffs hit the swtor team at work so can't link article but I really wish they would spend sometime fixing things in game before down sizing. I really don't know if this is normal but I have seen tons of people coming back because of group finder merges and boredom to d3. Hopefully they continue improving the game instead of maintaining

[Zargs]

Its normal when you make a big game. Nothing new. The job is done. No need to pay them anymore. All that got layoff was most likely Employed for a limited amount of time. Again its normal. When we installed 250 WiFi access points in the school I was working at, we had 18 ppl working whit it. Not included the ppl that put up all the hardware. Now 8 month later is 2 ppl working whit it.

I dont get why ppl read so much in to stuff like this. Why? Its normal.

[brisselio]

I think people look into this so much because they think if they are laying people off then they can't make enough money to pay those people anymore so they have to go.

[Eide]

It's partially to do with limited income of course but Zargs has the right of it when he says the majority of the job is done and that means downsizing the team.

The gaming industry is not one with a whole lot of job security. Studios appear and disappear as rapidly a day and night. A year is a really long time in gaming, 10 years is akin to going back to biblical times. Studios go with the flow so to say. Making a game means investing in people. When the game is down to tune down the team to cover support and possibly DLC. It's a natural and normal way of doing things.

[Count Sacula]

What I don't understand is why are the community management people getting axed? I could understand developers and such as most of the heavy lifting has been done. This can't be a good thing.

EA Confirms Layoffs at BioWare Austin | TORWars

[Scripts]

Community Managers versus Developers - In theory, the "heavy marketing" is done, so you don't necessarily need as many people reaching out to all the different fan sites (like OR.net/DarthHater/TorWars/Etc.) for marketing/pre-release hype. You still need some people to maintain the forums/facebook/twitter, but some of that can be passed off to CS staff (forum moderation, etc.), so your community team can continue to shrink some, depending on what's going on, outreach wise. Looking at writing staff being cut also makes sense, depending on what they specialize in. Someone that worked pretty heavily on the origin/pre level 20 stuff? The game might not really need them now. We still need the guys that worked on the late game stuff, or work on the Ops stuff, or flashpoints, etc. They also might have said, "you know what, we have 10 writers and maybe we only need 5 now based on what our plans are for the next 12 months."

Weren't there also reports that this is one of the largest teams EA has fielded, in a while, for one game? If there were, it makes sense that as EA/BW go into focused release/upkeep that the development team would shrink to deal with those types of things.