TL;DR
CCP is laying off 20% of their staff (around 100-160 employees), focusing more on Eve Online development and DUST, World of Darkness gets delayed and assigned a reduced staff, dog and cats living together, mass hysteria! (sorry I let myself go).
You better read the full announcement:
CCP focuses on the Eve Universe – a ccp announcement
At CCP we have been working hard to expand the gaming landscape by applying the knowledge and expertise we’ve built up with EVE Online to create a new experience within the EVE Universe in DUST 514, as well as a new video game franchise in World of Darkness.
During the last few months, as evidenced by our interaction with the community, we made some missteps on that journey.
As we reexamine our outward relations, we are also taking time to reevaluate our internal goals. In doing so, 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.
Rather than allowing this to persist, 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.
We are very sad to lose some of our talented and dedicated colleagues to this necessary process. Naturally we are making every effort within our means to help them find alternative employment. Decisions like these are difficult for all those involved and extraordinarily sad for all of those whose lives are affected.
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 will enable us to accelerate timeframes for new features and increase our ability to respond to community needs. The fruits of this realignment will be seen as early as this winter with the upcoming EVE Online expansions and the launch of DUST 514 private trials.
We understand how an announcement such as this can be perceived by our community and industry peers. We feel it is important to clearly address two questions that might arise.
First, EVE Online is in good health. Our subscriber numbers are higher today than they were a year ago. Unlike many other MMO’s on the market, we have continued to grow year-on-year since launch in 2003. However, over the past two months, our subscribers have gone down from their peak this summer. We attribute this to our own mistakes and poor communications with our players. We are correcting that now.
Second, 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.
As an innovator in the industry, CCP has never shied away from tough decisions, remaining agile to allow for shifts in production, technology and gaming trends since even before the launch of EVE Online. While our decision to refocus is a solemn one, it will benefit our players through a renewed commitment to the EVE Universe and its fans.
-Please keep discussion about this announcement in the following EVE forum thread. Thank you for your understanding that this day, and the days in the near future, will be very hard on the individuals at CCP. Sincerely, CCP Manifest
Icelandic media already covered the issue, they mentioned the 20% layoff of current employes:
34 positions in Reykjavik office
80 positions in Atlanta office
The New York, Newcastle and Shanghai offices remain mostly unchanged. According to the news article this is done to put emphasis on development on its two main products EVE Online and DUST514 (which they state will be released next year). Development on WoD will be slowed in the mean time.
- thanks to sindrifreyr for this tip.
Discussion
Like a recently divorced hot-mom, CCP Games has been rattling the cages and shaking off some fat, for those who doubted Hillmar’s letter of apology, these announcements should come as a proof of real changes being made inside the Reykjavik company. Personally I don’t like lay-offs since it brings a sense of uncertainty for the employees inside a company, on the other hand is it in these times were new leaders and innovators come to shine, what’s your take on this announcement and how do you think it will affect Eve Online as a game?.
company receives complaints about quality of the product/service – company cuts 20% of staff – company anounces to now am better prepaired to deliver a functioning product/service
this is so common, yet so sad
well this sucks…i wish the very best to the employees.
Questions: Was this their survival strategy? To make tons of cash out of gold ammo to pay for their rapid/agressive expansion while at the same time not fixing all the bugs and issues in the game for the last 2 years?
Its very sad that the employees hired and now fired are paying for the bad planning of those managers…
Sad, very sad.
Best of luck to all.
whoops was it our fault?
It was management, shamefully management won't get the boot.
managers never get the boot, They always get a bonus at the end of the month no matter what.
worst is all those new employees that have emigrated or maybe even lose house or have a family to look after. SHAMEFULL MANAGEMENT is the right words here.
Can I + vote this more than once?
And with the housing market in Atlanta right now, it would really suck to have moved there and now be faced with leaving the area.
Maybe.
But they're a startup, and startups usually have monthly board meetings.
And it's really the board that drives all strategic decisions, and (in a startup) usually any major tactical one.
So sure, it's management, but it's the part of management that came along with the vulture … um, I mean venture … capital.
Yoh! If you look at the CCP make up their Management is made up of people who were working at lower levels originally, and rose up to management. With fewer people to manage, these people can now focus on production in stead of management people.
If CCP's managers were actually manager from the beginning more people could be managed by fewer people. Management is a different Skill set than Developers. Sadly you get made into a manager base on your technical work, which is not the people management skills you need to be a manager.
So in the end there are fewer managers as those positions lost will now be filled by those managers.
Since these layoffs were planned in time for hilmar's letter I'm left wondering if it really was step 1 of this process of cutting back.
Really does seem like the community reaction hit where it counted.
CCP should remember that EVE population seems to be older than most other MMO games. A lot of people that play eve. know how a business works.
Too bad that this isn´t something that noone told them.
This is the result of an enterprise that don´t give a shit about the main income.
When those 20% were not focused on EVE, and instead took management's focus away from EVE, then indeed, EVE players can get a better experience. The cost is to the WoD fanbase, which will now need to wait more for their MMO. It is robbing Peter to pay Paul to some degree, but in this case, the EVE community is Paul.
Sounds to me the subscription falloff hit them harder than they anticipated. I believe this recent mea culpa has more to do with a cash-flow issue than the epiphany Hilmar claimed.
It was an epiphany. If you have 10% margin and lose 2% income, you've just lost 20% of your entire profit. A little change goes a long way.
EVE Online Management, putting their soldiers up against the bulkhead and shooting them for following management orders.
Why is it never the people who create the mess who lose their jobs?
Is EVE dying yet?
All companies use money from profitable parts of the business to fund additional ventures. But then most companies don't completely ignore the users of their bread-and-butter product to force features that no one wants.
I don't think they realized how many people (like me) were on the edge of cancelling. I was so frustrated by the endless lag and my Eve client crashing at the absolute WORST possible times, that the aurum and nex fiasco was like rubbing salt into a wound.
"But then most companies don't completely ignore the users of their bread-and-butter product to force features that no one wants."
Actually, when you think about it, a surprising lot of companies do this, just not game companies. (I'm thinking facebook, skype, youtube, pretty much every -big- non-game internet related service/product out there)
Game companies tend to listen more to their users though; the main reason companies get away with this is because there isn't a better alternative. With games, there is always another alternative.
Funny you should mention Skype, as they just got bought up by Microsoft…
I feel sorry for the employees affected by this down turn. Too bad its always the employees following orders that get the boot and not the managers who made the poor decisions. At least we got CCP's attention. I do wonder why they didn't re-allocate those people to fixing the numerous issues with Eve.
Refocusing the workforce on a trimmed down delivery schedule should have been thier first move… unless their cash flow got away from them too quickly. Now they lose talent and moral. Tough times Hilmar! I'll keep subscribing at least until I see the new rules set for nullsec…
Because having extra people on team doesn't always mean that you'll get results faster (or added productivity would be worth of extra cost in wages). If you wanted WoD out of the picture you'll have to HTFU and admit that it means people hired to make (or assist in making) of WoD and with projected profits from WoD in mind will have to walk the plank.
This is an excellent and common sense decision by CCP.
Eve is not a test bed for half baked beta projects from other products. If you can't fund it, don't run it.
Eve always # 1, then Dust , then Wod as a side project until dust is out.
Never neglect and mistreat Eve for short sighted potential gains rooted in greed.
But … but all the Monocles we bought. Didn't that help?
Best of luck to everyone who was laid off.
"During the last few months, as evidenced by our interaction with the community, we made some Royal Fuckups] on that journey."
fixed that for them
i hope the Hilmar guy feels gulty somewhat
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Krug…
Tombozo, is that you?
tl;dr: Americans are so stupid they don't even realize they are stupid. PS: I'm American
He's talking about a Icelandic man when referencing the Dunning Kruger effect and yet you feel the need to project it to only Americans? American or not, you're simply an idiot.
Strangely, i feel this has nothing to do with what happened in EVE's community.
Looks to me like a very clever way of making adjustments to the current economical crisis without blurping it out loud.
Notice they say they have more subscribers than a year ago, not a month ago. Might CCP be having problems with their wallet? like it not updating as expected? Its a feature. Not a bug.
"Strangely, i feel this has nothing to do with what happened in EVE's community. "
Not quite, read the next article. I'm sure the investors behind the $12 million are paying attention to what is going on with Eve Online. Granted they don't give a shit about the DRF or Titans or Supers and what needs nerfing or not. What they do care about are subscriptions and cancelled accounts. That leads back to all the missteps in the last year or more by CCP. If CCP lets Eve Online wither away they are losing their only income producer and that they absolutely cannot allow to happen.
hum… i hadn't read that one. That spins it the whole other way around.
Guess we can be a little more optimistic about our ships and all the giggles that go with it. =D
Hopefully it really becomes like a proper game. Not a beta for years. – if u know what i mean. Which you do. probably!
Thanks for the correction.
They hired on a lot of people and the subs increased slightly. So, yeah, that has a major financial impact on a company.
You're trying to get more loving to the EVE/dust projects by cutting 20% of the staff in non-related areas and not increasing staff in EVE/Dust workforces… so nothing has really changed in terms of your capacity to do work for EVE or dust… you've just cut costs without reallocating the freed up talent to work for you… nice….
I would have been happier to have seen "20% of the Managers have been laid off" tbh.
Soundwave was actually pretty chill when I met him in Vegas, he was a little tight lipped and somewhat difficult to communicate with, just seems the kind of guy who won't talk if your not talking bout something he wants to talk about, instead of trying to change the conversation. Then again, that might just be because he knows he can get away with it.
Please fire CCP Soundwave because he's a douchebag.
Thanks.
fuck no fire torfi and scott craig the two fuckers who made incarna
Its always the workers fault regardless of what manager made the decisions, because when you become management the first thing they give you is a Teflon suit and large axe to kill the workers with because managers never make mistakes and pay for it
With all the graphics demands of a solo CQ I'm not surprised that WoD has been pushed back. Imagine the graphics requirements of 10's to hundreds of Avatars running around melting GPUs! I'd wonder what it was like to be a fly on the wall in the WoD developers meeting when they saw thier mass alpha test of WoD in Eve not only blow up because it was tested on the wrong audience but also because the GPU's requirments were near melting videocards
[single] Nvidia 570s handle CQ just fine. Fact they can handle up to 3 separate CQs (aka 3 clients). And you can run at least 4 CQs if you run 1 on max and the other 3 on "Performance" preset….probably more I was only at ~38fps for each of them; down from 59.99fps [capped].
And it's no surprise, CCP knew you'd need better gear and offered a 10% (or was it 15%) coupon for Nvidia 470,480,560…think even up to 580s; I don't have the email coupon anymore to check.
Still a shitty rollout. What we got now is what we should have had at Incarna launch, only 'The Hangar' should have been the default view. Would be like "hey, check out the beta-CQ everyone, what ya think?" Instead of, "HOPE YOU FUCKING LOVE IT; TO BAD IF YOU DON'T!"
PS: when does Hil-tard get the pink slip?
Welcome to Eve Peanut Gallery, where nothing ccp does is ever good enough and the world is bleak and without hope!
But Aurical! I have been around since the Foreverwar, and every time CCP promises something they never deliver! CCP is untrustworthy and lies to us! If only they could be like other game companies that never make mistakes and provide us with an amazing open sandbox without equal!
"However, over the past two months, our subscribers have gone down from their peak this summer. We attribute this to our own mistakes and poor communications with our players. We are correcting that now."
This is the key para. Glad CCP is waking up. Remains to be seen if it's enough though.
This is definitely true. I stopped playing over the summer due to mistakes that were being made, but having read and believed Hilmars statement, I'm back, looking forward to the winter expansion and hoping for better times.
Shame that Zymurgist, Fallout and Wrangler got the boot
I'm shocked that they are being let go. This seems like the classic business mistake of cutting advertising and marketing when times are tough. Yeah, you have short term savings but the long term effects…
They will be missed.
Zymurgist
Wrangler
Fallout
Pouring one out for the fallen.
Something tells me they got thrown under the bus by upper management, met a couple of em at Vegas, they were pretty chill dudes.
please god fire soundwave
Why? He's the champion of everything good that has been happening recently. At least from my point of view.
how u know these specific persons are being let go
Each have announced they received notice. Two through twitter, one through forums.
Pann as well I believe.
I say they hand out 5 million free skill points as a "I am sorry, we didn't listen to you"
this does not make sense at all…
They are getting rid of 20% of their employees, although they claim the numbers of subscribers is still rising since last year.
They still say they are going to work on World of Darkness, just with reduced numbers.
How does that make sense at all? If you develop a game, you need numbers, just like in EvE…
Having 10 employees working on a game that is supposed to be a major development for MMORPGs is like saying "we don't care, we invested a lot already, but it's not going anywhere".
IMHO this is the first step of CCP saying that they are running out of money and EvE is already down 20% or more in subscribers.
The core code of the game is completed (read Incarna). They probably are keeping artists to build the environment for the time being. CCP needs to stabilize Eve numbers. They will probably shift focus when Dust is completed.
Well done Eve community . You got 160 people you were not angry with fired.
Saw this coming a mile off, I have to say.
omg it´s our own fault. we should have bought more monocles to give ccp the income to work furthermore on 2 games we don´t want while cold-shouldering eve online.
ccp has overwhelming us with new content and we didn´t give a damn about it.
now they have to fire 20% of their employees while the numbers of subscribers is still rising since last year.
What CCP is about to do has got nothing to do with EVE. CCP wants to make more money and they can achive that by firing 20% of its staff. They use and throw you. If CCP had proper leadership then none of this would have happend. Instead CCP has a CEO that cant manage a big company and its customers. His strategy is to ignore the customers and hoping all the bad will go away by itself. Guess not. Considering the subscription numbers are dropping. The best thing of all. He says that the current subscription numbers are better then last years. If that would be the case. Why fire 20% of the staff. Its simply another ignore mode to the current problem. Us customers get nothing but promises about how CCP is going to work on EVE. For years now they ended up doing the opposite. And because of mismanagement. Employees, which also involves their families, end up on the street without work. Way to go! its a new high for CCP. Down with the subscription numbers.
eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=108…
The more NCDOT members resub, the more delicious mails like this will surface… T1 guns, 4 WCS, I think I'll stop there o_0 even for a travel fit it's fucking awful.
Yes, that's a terrible travel fit (even converted from a ratting ship). I seem to be missing what the relevance to this article is though…?
Not sure how I feel about this…. The letter seemed to suggest that it was the WOD team that was downsizing and that more focus would now to given to developing Eve.
And then they go fire Fallout, Zymurgist, Wrangler, and (unconfirmed) Pann? Did they have anything at all to do with WOD?
sad thing is you all care. get interested in some other game that actually delivers fun rather than sitting around forever waiting for a blob to form or chase some rats. EVE died long ago.
Personally I have no intention of paling or have anything to do with Dust in any shape or form. I was however was really looking forward to WOD. CCP seemed to have turned to USA style of management, which is essentially centred around publicity for the sake of publicity with no long term concrete plans.
There is absolutely no reason to link Dust into EVE unless one of the games has a major problem with it that would prevent it from being competitive in its market space. WOD is promising to bring unique game experience. If this is true, then it will be the only game to offer something different in market that is saturated with half complete projects that look like they were made by the same 3 people with different graphics applied to it.
I'm glad Hilmar didn't go off and say 'look what you assholes did, unsubbing en masse, now we have to lay off a whole bunch of staff because you wanted to spin your goddamn ships!'
And though I'm glad he didn't say that, because it would make him look like a total douche, it's sort of true: CCP expects subscribers to stay, and when a whole bunch leave, it costs people jobs. And when people leave out of principle (as I did), it might change the game to our liking, but it doesn't actually help.
Cheers and good luck to the 80+ employees in Atlanta.
TL;DR (for the comments) – We got what we wanted but now we want to whine about CCP's business strategy as well as folks we don't know who lost their jobs!
So essentially, Incarna was testing for a game CCP will never make?
Sad thing they couldn't apply knowledge obtained on a spaceship game to a vampire game. They looked very similar, because they were both games.( irony detected!).
Farewell! www.almaroc.com/?p=1896
a nessesary evil, the mmo market climaxed in 2008 and has been declining since, if ccp is an innovative company then thy should be making a tablet pc mmo/games and mobile gaming.
correction: subscription based mmos climaxed about a year ago,
the F2P ones are still growing
People getting fire is always bad news. But had the players not shown their feelings in numbers the management could understand -> lost money -> the complaints would not be taken seriously and in time EVE would become much worse and less viable.
If they get it through their thick heads to upgrade and update flying space and improve noob retention, EVE can go on for a long time.
TBH I feel that once again they are blowing smoke signals up my ass.
are we getting a 20% discount on subscriptions TOO??? HELL NO JUST MORE PEOPLE OUT OF WORK AND THE REST WORK HARDER AND THE BOSS GETS RICHER.
Leave it to the Icelanders to fire the Americans first.
just make sure you fire all the goons now that you have the chance
[...] have been pretty shaky lately at CCP Games, CEO apologies, layoffs, chunks of cake being given away, all this makes us wonder what’s really behind all this? [...]