Boom: CCP Fire 20% Staff, Focus On Eve
"...we have made the decision to sharpen our focus. Sadly, this means reducing our staff. We estimate that around twenty percent of global positions will be affected by this process. These will be predominantly in our Atlanta, GA office, although select positions in our Reykjavik, Iceland office will be affected."
More on this below.
This comes about, according to CCP, because "we have come to the conclusion that we are attempting too many things for a company our size. Developing EVE expansions, DUST 514 and World of Darkness has stretched our resources too thin."
It seems that World Of Darkness will suffer most in the wake of this decision, and will of course be delayed:
Following this reorganization, we must do a better job by focusing on these priorities:
- For the immediate future, our mission is to enrich the vast EVE Universe by strengthening the continuous development of EVE Online while preparing to bring DUST 514 to market on the PS3. We do this in order to realize our ambitious and challenging plan of joining the two in a cross-platform, truly massive online world.
-World of Darkness will continue development with a significantly reduced team. This team will continue to iterate and expand on the gameplay and systems they have designed. We will also redeploy creative teams in Atlanta to support the launch of DUST 514.
This sounds like a major blow for the development of WoD, which is disappointing. Of course I am in no position to comment on the current state of either project, especially since neither of them are much in the public sphere so far. Nevertheless, the idea of concentrating on a PS3-only sci-fi F2P shooter hooked into a totally different genre on another platform, rather than concentrating on a Vampire-driven MMO, strikes me as folly. Personally it's my feeling that DUST514 was the wrong project for CCP, and will remain so.
Of course WoD is not dead:
World of Darkness lives on. Its concepts are revolutionary. CCP continues to believe that it will alter the landscape of the MMO as significantly as EVE has done but we need more time to continue to develop them before dedicating the substantial resources required to bring this experience to market.
Let's hope this part of the statement is true, and that CCP making the next big step in MMOs (rather than trying to break into consoles with a shooter) is still what happens.
Our thoughts are, of course, with all those people who will lose their jobs.