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[Vikarion]

I'm sorry to see CCP having to do this, but I think that we should guard against a couple of fallacies.

First, while we do see some more public and popular CCP employees getting the axe, that does not mean that other, less visible employees are not also being let go. Moreover - and this may sound cruel - the fact that some CCP employees get along well with the player base does not mean that they are in fact productive employees. I remember well one employee in our company who was funny, engaging, and wonderful to clients, but was also one of the least efficient and productive workers I have ever met.

Second, if you are going to blame capitalism and the capitalistic system for CCP firing employees, then capitalism must also get the credit for Eve Online existing in the first place, and being as interesting and engaging as it is. In my line of work, one has plenty of opportunities to interact with government and with government services, and I must confess that a somewhat neutral attitude on my part has been altered by my experiences into a true loathing of everything related to the government. Among my many complaints is the fact that since government faces no competition, most employees of it have no incentive to be either efficient or helpful.

Anyway, I still think that DUST 514 is a terrible idea, and one project that CCP should have refrained from embarking upon. It doesn't appear to offer exceptional game play, it is a genre they are historically unfamiliar with, and, worst of all, they are offering it on a very limited platform.

Other objections besides my last are, of course, surmountable. But whereas the PC is ubiquitous, the PS 3 is perhaps not even the most popular or reliable platform, and is in any case less polished than some others. And yet, CCP intends to try to integrate this very limited audience with that of Eve. Besides the mere demographic problems of such a connection (I am sure you are all well aware of the 10-year-old pre-pubescent screaming epithets over such console networks), there is CCP's seeming unconcern for the difficulties of creating a new and untried link between an extremely complex and unstable system (Tranquility), and another public and unreliable system (Sony's). Perhaps I am overly pessimistic, but this does seem to me to be a bit like walking a high-wire while juggling. That is to say, possible, but not necessarily plausible, and certainly not advisable.

Cross your fingers.

[Jade Constantine]

Well capitalism is capitalism at the end of the day, there is no "nice" or "nasty" capitalism, it is what it is (and that is what some of us forget from time to time -> its a brutal dehumanising exploitative regime designed to make the people at the top rich at the cost of those at the bottom.)

I've personally lived through 2-3 of these massacres in companies I've worked for and seen my share of top level director corruption/outright criminality protected our (uk) business convention and legal system - was ultimately why I went freelance and said fuck the corporate work ethos with a knobbly stick in 1998 - being an employee is a mugs game.

As for this fiasco at CCP. Its poor senior management decision-making pure and simple. They drank their own coolaid for far too long and believed they could coast along on minimal Eve Online investment simply by talking about :awesome: and delivering nothing of substance. The shame of it is the people making the poor decisions are the ones with senior positions and shares in the company who get to wield the axe not bend their heads for it.

It was pretty clear that the Eve player base said a long and loud "enough" this summer with the Jita Riots and unsub protest and Hillmar's "stay the course" arrogant bluff got well and truly called. The problem is we've caused a financial impact that the bad people in CCP get to allocate on others rather than suffer themselves. This could just cause a continuing spiral at this point if the Senior Management don't get the damned message and fire everyone involved with NeX/MT/nickel and dime bullshit rather than eliminating the people trying their hardest to keep the community on side with decent engagement.

There are some very good people getting the axe right now and I haven't yet seen the NeX devs doing the walk of shame they richly deserve (I guess because senior management backed those plays?)

So if this turns out to Hilmar and crew having fired their 20% and turning up at the office on monday and telling the survivors to "stay the course" (a bit more) and do a better job of selling ship skins and skirts to a reluctant player-base then I kinda despair for CCP.

That idiot dev with the Monocle needed to go.
$1000 jeans guy needed to go.
Anyone who thought that a half-assed Amarrian-themed cash shop with overpriced rubbish suited this game needed to go.

Well loved community reps doing a decent job (I actually liked Fallout a lot) ... not so much.

Of course reading behind the actions - it's likely its geographical in the main. Anyone who didn't work in iceland (and wasn't prepared to relocate) would be top of the list. But will be interesting to see exactly what casualties there are in the Iceland office (MT/Nex vs content/community) there. Iceland is definitely a cheaper place to hire and maintain staff than the US is.

Ultimately this is again a case of "what they do". If Hilmar comes out and does a press release with pictures of his ginger majesty throwing the development notes and project plan for NeX store into the harbour (alongside CCP Zinfandel and his monocle) then maybe just maybe they'll pull out of this. But until I see something on that scale I doubt I'll be resubbing for real money.

As for World of Darkness ... my read on the announcement is that CCP will never publish that game. The people they are retaining will be tasked with producing conceptual tech demos and marketing stuff to support its IP sale to another player in the market to help claw back some of the losses.

[Myrhial Arkenath]

I get the bit about us seeing only the visible people got but isn't community & content & database kind of like the important bits? I mean, they took all but one or two people out in most cases, that is a drop of 50% to 70% in those departments. Unless other departments were all one person they really could not fire, it seems just strange to me.

Also, I'm wondering if it was Hilmar who made the call on this (I assume he did OK it), or if it was one of them newly hired "experts". Yes, popular employees might not be the most productive, but uhm, as a blogger & twitter enthusiast I kinda feel I've lost a large chunk of CCPers that I interacted with quite often. I'm not even sure who I have to mail now about things like the fansite program. And yes, there is probably chaos on the inside right now, but still, I found Zymurgist and Fallout easy to approach about these things.

At least Dropbear got to stay. I weep for the loss of MaidenSteel though. Abraxas got to stay too, yey. Not heard of TonyG. May stay due to book being written? Was not a big fan of his first book but I'm willing to give the man another chance, because I did like his presentation at FF 2010.

As I wrote on the official forums, I hope this will save the sinking ship, and not be the beginning of the end, because that'd be a total waste. Yes, MMO's don't live on forever, but EVE is pretty unique and fills a niche that is not really at the mercy of other titles releasing, except for the product being totally screwed up. Most of the promised changes for the next expansion look good, although I have severe doubts about PI. I'm worried about future expansions though. While some "bloat" may have been dealt with I am pretty sure they will become smaller expansions again. And while less people kinda benefits agile development -- though correct implementation should NOT affect this -- it is still a point of worry. EVE has to keep on rolling out new things, yet there is so much old stuff that needs to be iterated on, and we're promised this, yet it may be delayed by all this. Worst case, it never happens, which would really fail.

I hope this is the last setback, because summer has been hell. Half my corp is on leave, and other corps had the same, only now facing a slow increase / return. Never have I seen summer this bad, and while some things like choosing to live in the depths of Curse could have an impact, none of my still active members voiced an issue with that. And the list of leaves pretty much reads lack of motivation, and work, which while a valid excuse is often also just a nice way to say that the game has lost its pull. No surprise. I'm feeling less motivated too, and I've narrowed it down to getting repeatedly kicked down by CCP. Yes, they are fixing it, this is probably needed to fix it too, but you can only get players hopes up so many times before they stop believing you. Even the most casual player who does not read the blogs and forums and all will probably have seen "20% layoffs" and from having casually played other MMO's seeing something like that tends to have you go like "hmm, this is not good, do I want to keep sinking time in this game?".

Winter will tell, I suppose. My account is still paid for until beginning of next year, so I'll stick it out.

[Graelyn]

Honestly, the people who should be most disappointed are the fans of the White Wolf games.

Most of that development company is now gone.

[Kiki Truzhari]

Jade and Myrhial summed it up pretty well. This seems pretty well and good like a case of scapegoating to me. I'm willing to forgive it if the things they've promised actually come through.

Will it be enough to save the sinking ship that is CCP? Maybe. Time will tell I guess.

[Victoria Stecker]

Most of what I think has already been said, although I am a little more worried about this being the start of the downward spiral; Over the spring and summer, CCP screwed the pooch and lost a lot of subs. This had to be a real concern for their investors, who may have realized, "Hmm, these guys really don't know their asses from a hole in the wall, do they?" This in turn makes investors unwilling to help them financially and they're in bad shape. Hence, layoffs.

The other questions is whether these are temporary or permanent layoffs. When the economy took a flying shit in 2008, the company I worked had to lay off a decent portion of its work force - and then worked to rehire them as soon as business picked up enough that it could. Temporary layoffs are a part of any major downturn in business. In theory, then, it might be possible that CCP will be able to rehire them once subscriptions pick up again - except for that bit about relocating to Iceland. That makes it look more like a permanent layoff and closing of the Atlanta branch.

It is, as always, unfortunate that the people who made the decisions that lead to this and the people who are suffering as a result are not likely the same people.

Frustrating.

[Kenpachi]

Tell me TonyG is out, please?

I don't think he will be, due to the fact he still has an unpublished book.

[Helen Ohmiras]

Tell me TonyG is out, please?

I don't know what would happen to his latest book if they fired him, since it hasn't been released yet 

It would still be released.  CCP isn't publishing it, TOR Books is. 

[Yoshito Sanders]

I've seen studios survive larger layoffs. Cryptic, in 2006, laid off 75% of its staff and was reduced to a mere 15 people. City of Heroes is still going relatively strong and they have a game that is fundamentally less engaging and interesting, and less well-developed, than EVE.

[Kyoko Sakoda]

Yoshito is right, CCP will survive this layoff and they know that. Whether a lot of bitter old vets like me will survive with out enthusiasm in tact is a different story.

[Arkady Sadik]

Yoshito is right, CCP will survive this layoff and they know that. Whether a lot of bitter old vets like me will survive with out enthusiasm in tact is a different story.

It's the defining feature of a bitter old vet to only have enthusiasm left to post on the forums about how they do not like EVE anymore. It seems CCP's layoffs aren't changing that.

I have this weird vision of a world in 20 years where people discuss on the forums about how they never really liked that spaceships game they played 10 years ago. <.<

[Robert Kauliford]

Though it's not much, Hilmar and other senior execs taking pay cuts would at least cut down on conspiracy theories

Edit

Ps am I the only one wondering if this is related to Nex in more way than one? Could be that investors were promised other revenue streams and CCP have now had to turn round to them and go 'sorry but they're not buying it'

[Helen Ohmiras]

I've seen studios survive larger layoffs. Cryptic, in 2006, laid off 75% of its staff and was reduced to a mere 15 people. City of Heroes is still going relatively strong and they have a game that is fundamentally less engaging and interesting, and less well-developed, than EVE.

Actually, Cryptic doesn't have anything to do with City of Heroes anymore, though this seems to escape many people who are playing Cryptic games (the number of people who refer to Champions as City of Heroes is staggeringly high, even on the Champions forums).  Cryptic was bought out by Atari after they failed to live up to Marvel's expectations in developing the Marvel Universe MMO.  Cryptic was also sold to Perfect World recently (for apparently under $100,000 according to some reports).  They are developing the new Neverwinter game (and claiming it will be an "MMORPG"), working on Star Trek Online and Champions MMOs (Champions is F2P and STO will be shortly), and the ubiquitous "mysterious projects intended to diversify the company".*

Cryptic survived, but they are not the company they once were, not to mention the turnover of employees is insane.

As for CCP, I have hope.  They have done more with less in the past, let's just hope they get that fire in their belly back.  The sad thing is, CCP could have easily transitioned to a F2P model if they had priced the NEX items a bit more reasonably. :-/

Let's also be realistic; not all the subscriber losses were due to dislike of the game, but the inability to play multiple game clients for some.  I know that my computer could no longer run multiple accounts, and in fact died (partially) due to an inability to run WiS content.

I think that maybe the same subscription issues would have been around even if the NEX issues had not occurred.

It's times like these that define a company.  Can they bounce back with more vigor than they had before?  We'll see.

@Robert Kauliford:

I'm betting that NEX was a miscalculation and a last minute change in plans, most likely to add additional revenue, but only exacerbated a situation that was already beyond repair.


*tl;dr: Though I may be off on the exact order of things, Cryptic does not produce CoH/CoV, and now has two completely different games and are owned by a Korean game company.  So, yes, they survived; however, they are not the same company.

[Seriphyn]

http://asia.gamespot.com/shows/start-select/?event=startselect20111020&tag=updates%3Beditor%3Ball%3Btitle%3B1

we're famous

[Gottii]

Maiden Steel