SOE suffers cutbacks as 35 employees are laid off

Nowadays - it doesn't matter if you're a good employee or not, or if the company is making big bucks. You'll get cut anyway.

And given today's economy - that usually means lots of pain ahead.

It's a shame that good hard working employees have to get laid off because people who have been given the privileged position of managing things can't do it properly.

I almost wonder if they plan to lay off any of the SWG staff. As it is, they've been reducing thru attrition (not replacing folks as they leave).

Terrible news now I'm sure they are not making a planetside 2. Let alone getting at least 1 developer working on the game whatsoever.

Free Realms mega-success? Dubious at best. It's even arguable that they exaggerated the numbers or atleast spun them in order to win LA's nod for a clone wars "mmo".

Even IF those numers are legit - free gamers translating into real revenue is a difficult endeavor and it is doubtful fleece realms pulled it off. DDO, on the other hand,...

Vanguard team?

It's always sad news to hear about people losing their jobs, I hope that the people affected by this are able to bounce back quickly.

So cutting jobs is going to "improve operational efficiency". As if people losing their jobs wasn't bad enough why do companys feel the need to come out with that kind of BS?

Was Vanguard or SWG hit?

Probably the rest of the Vanguard team...

Yet another example of corporate greed. Cut employees so upper management can get a bigger bonus check than last year's. Now the remaining employees have to work three times as hard for the same pathetic paycheck. What are the chances that any of the fired are administrators or executives. I mean, if a company really wants to save money, then you should remove the most expensive overhead, right?

It may be to much to ask if these were ALL devs, sadly the majority may have been folks needing money.

I did have to laugh at this quote:

"better align the company's resources against areas of growth that meet consumer demand in today's online market as well as improve operational efficiency."

What that really means is they did the math for this coming years xmas bonuses and the top three found they need to do some cutbacks so their bonuses were safe.

I fixed the quote for SOE:

"better align the company's payroll against having to many people on it that would consume our bonus payroll resources in today's online market as well as improve future bonus efficiency."

I think the success of Free Realms is highly exaggerated.

One of EQ2's best devs was laid off. :