Feldon From the EQ2 Forums:
Fellow Adventurers,
We wanted to share this information with you here, rather than having you read about it on another site. The EQII community is a large part of the ongoing success of SOE, and the game is in a strong position to succeed. Development continues unabated on EverQuest II, and you can look forward to a Producer’s Letter next week with more information about what lies ahead for the game’s development in 2011.
For those who wish to comment, please use THIS thread. It will remain unlocked as long as conversation remains constructive and polite. Our CMs and Mods have been asked to redirect all other related posts to this one as well.
~Linda “Brasse” Carlson
Director, Global Community Relations
Following is the official notice that you may see on other sites:
As part of a strategic decision to reduce costs and streamline its global workforce, SOE announced today that it will eliminate 205 positions and close its Denver, Seattle and Tucson studios. As part of this restructuring, SOE is discontinuing production of The Agency so it can focus development resources on delivering two new MMOs based on its renowned PlanetSide and EverQuest properties, while also maintaining its current portfolio of online games. All possible steps are being taken to ensure team members affected by the transition are treated with appropriate concern.
This strategic decision will have no impact on SOE’s current portfolio of live games; additionally SOE will transition development efforts for the Denver and Tucson studios’ suite of products to its San Diego headquarters. This strategic alignment of development resources better positions SOE to remain a global leader in online gaming and deliver on its promise of creating entertaining games for players of all ages, and servicing the 20 million players that visited SOE servers in just the past year.
All the MBA speak aside, this could be a good thing for EQ2.
That’s too bad about The Agency, but trying to develop a game specifically to attract a female audience probably wasn’t that good of an idea to begin with. But it’s good to think outside of the box every once and a while, and a spy theme was interesting. It may indeed be a good thing for EQ2 — more resources to devote to it, perhaps to solve itemization-gate =)
We lost two devs according to SJ in the official thread. Not sure who yet. I’ve seen the following devs post today:
Silius
Kander
SJ obviously
Windslasher
Rothgar
Domino
Bunji
I haven’t seen Gninja post yet. He’s usually pretty active and I hope he wasn’t one of the ones hit.
Crikey, 205 positions is a lot, unfortunately a lot more then just the Agency dev team, out of interest for those who do not know the studios cut do the following
Denver – Legends of Norrath, Star wars trading card game, Magic the
gathering tactics, clone wars card commander, Free realms
trading card game.
Seattle – The agency
Tucson – Pox Nora
(Source – http://corporate.station.sony.com/en/tucson-studio.vm)
That must suck especially for the guys in Tuscon since they were brought out a few years ago to bring F2P expertise to SOE.
I really would have preferred to see 2 more devs brought to EQ2, in terms of staff it seems pretty stable there though since the last job losses three were added.
The one silver lining though is that EQ1 and EQ2 are free now of most of the AAA MMO’s in development, with Planetside Next due for launch soon and no doubt the spare staff moving onto EQNext soon there will be a lot of earners and just one money sink.
A much healthier situation then September last year when they had Clone wars, DCUO, PSNext, EQNext and the agency all in development. Personally I think the top management though at SOE have to take the blame for over extending the company, they’ve managed to damage their existing IP’s (played by people they hope to be future customers) by a lack of investment.
Well, they have a chance though to at least address that.
Here’s hoping GNinja survives too, listening to him during the EQTalk podcast (number #17, I heartily recommend hunting it down) showed his great passion for the game.
I guess Gninja is still on the island, thank god.
According to Gaige on Flames (he seems to be a fairly reliable source of leet beta infoz):
“The EQ2 layoffs were Adam Stevens, aka Zaphax, a developer who did the golden path update and some other things. The other was zone artist Stephanie Young, who did Seb and was featured in an EQ2players article awhile back.”
EQ2 layoffs were Adam “Zaphax” Stevens and Stephanie Young (zone artist). Everyone else is still there and safe.
I hope Adam and Stephanie find jobs fast~