19 Oct, 2011
Rock, Paper, Shotgun is reporting on the CCP announcement that they are firing 20 percent of their employees and focusing efforts on Eve and DUST514, meaning that the World of Darkness MMO will be most affected by these layoffs.
With the recent debacles surrounding $60 monocles and pointless removal of ship spinning, among other things, focusing on Eve is probably what’s needed, at the moment. In theory, they’ve chased a fair amount of people off from Eve Online. Average daily logins has been trending down for the past several months, so refocusing and retooling their approach to Eve Online makes sense.
Jim Rossignol at Rock, Paper, Shotgun believes that, “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.”
Which is a fair point, but I believe that CCP knows what their target audience is with Eve Online and DUST514. A World of Darkness MMO, while interesting, must, by design, appeal to a much broader audience. And being exclusive to the PS3 isn’t really an issue, since the install base is fairly large at this point. If CCP can get just 500,000 people playing DUST514 (a tiny fraction of the PS3 market) that will dramatically increase the number of people involved with the Eve Online universe.
It’s sad to see the WoD MMO take a back seat, but until CCP gets the Eve Online train back on track, the chance of seeing the WoD MMO at all disappears completely.
20% of their staff, about 120 people. Not 20.
CCP also axed most of the community team for EVE Online.
20 PERCENT, not 20. Big diff there. Amounts to approximately 113 people.
As an EVE subscriber I’m happy to see them refocus, and they even say nice things about helping the affected staff find work in the press release.
On Tuesday of this week they patched “ship spinning” back in, which is basically being able to enter a station and see the old hangar, which loads and runs a lot faster than the completely worthless (for now) 3D avatar mode. My computer thanks them for this.
Thanks for catching that typo, guys. My original points still stand, though.