A rumor report on game industry gadfly Joystiq indicates that Mythic Entertainment, the developer of Warhammer Online, has been ht by yet another round of layoffs. According to the report "highly placed sources" have indicated that up to 130 people have been let go, including senior design staff. This particular report comes on the heels of parent company EA's massive third-quarter loss and if true, likely from EA's program to cut costs by trimming 1,100 jobs from payroll and closing a dozen facilities.


Mythic's latest subscriber figures for Warhammer Online put the number of paying players at approximately 300,000. While certainly not a small audience, it does mark a significant comedown from the 750,000 players reported near launch. Having already been dogged by rumors of the game's demise, Mythic CEO Mark Jacobs attempted to short-circuit the gossip by posting a letter on the game's official site addressing the layoffs. The letter read, in part:
Mythic has always been committed to maintaining a high level of development and customer service to our MMO players. In anticipation of rumors regarding staff reductions here at Mythic today, this seems like a good time to provide some insight into the future of development, customer service, quality assurance and play testing at Mythic. Though we are resizing the team to move from a pre-launch to a post-launch size, we remain fully committed to creating and delivering the best WAR experience.


Allen: While I don't want to minimize how awful it is when anyone loses their job, this isn't entirely unexpected. EA just posted a staggering loss and was forced to cut 11% of its workforce. Warhammer Online launched remarkably free of major technical bugs and it now has an (I assume) stable player base that's relatively familiar with how the game works. This makes the QA, customer service and certain technical positions within the WAR team pretty tempting to a company looking to eliminate overhead. There's a lot of ugliness happening at EA right now and it'd be naive to assume that Mythic would be exempt. 300,000 player subscriptions simply isn't enough to impart a Blizzard-like immunity to a division.

That being said, this certainly doesn't mean Warhammer Online is in danger of dying. Keep in in mind that World of Warcraft's massive subscriber base skews the graph for every other game out there. The Lord of the Rings Online has a smaller playerbase than WAR and it's fueling expansion within Turbine. Heck, Pirates of the Burning Sea and Ultima Online are still chugging along. It's entirely possible to make a successful and profitable business out of 300,000 players.

The "Call to Arms" content rollout is still proceeding and my conversation with Jeff Hickman didn't indicate that he felt like the game was in any danger of going away. While we feel for those who lost their jobs and hope the EA ship can right itself soon, it seems like at the moment reports of WAR's death are greatly exaggerated.