Bioware Announces SWTOR Layoffs
 

Today EA and Bioware announced a "restructuring" of the Austin studio responsible for the development of Star Wars: The Old Republic.

From GameIndustry International

Now the team is even smaller despite a crippling lack of gameplay. EA expects "continued" success... how?

Bummer that had to happen. I'm sure there's plenty of blame to go around, but what a mess!

Yeah....I had to uninstall SWTOR. It just lacked any meaningful gameplay. There aren't any other mmo's that can keep my attention, and swtor is the best one I've played in years...but after a couple months it was obvious that I was just wasting my time (a fact which any good mmo should disguise).

I wish them all well. At the end of the day, SWTOR just didn't bring enough innovation to the table. Fantastic story-telling and heaps of Star Wars lore can only keep me coming back for so long. On to the next MMO...

This happens all the time after large games are finished. There are always people brought on to get the work done on a project contract basis that are released/moved afterwards. The staffing requirements for a MMO in update/maintain mode is much different than when it's in pure development mode.

Regardless, I canceled my sub last week. Just didn't feel like playing MMOs anymore (TOR just happened to be the one I was currently subbed to). I knew my decision was sound when I watched Star Wars over the weekend and felt no desire to play the MMO.

Can we finally admit that it's not the recently released MMO titles that are flawed, but the genre itself? It's time for a revolution, not more rehashes of a gameplay model that's almost 15 years old now.

Step 1: Buy a Star Wars license.
Step 2: Record a brazillian lines of dialogue.
Step 3: ??
Step 4: Profit!

EA's layoffs
 

Usually they do their layoffs around Christmas . . . guess it came early this year :(

The model of content-provided will always end thus. Developers who embrace content-community created thrive. Look at Valve and Mr Minecraft for two quick examples. Give the community the tools to make their own "missions" and allow them to "nest", and watch your user base grow rather than shrink.

WoW killed the MMO. But aside from that, there was much rejoicing because this allows EA and Bioware to grow SWTOR into the gradual, relentless decline in player base of a success that we are thrilled to announce.

So if reducing their staff allows them to maintain and grow Swtor, why don't they just cut it down to one person and blow us out of the water with the most amazing mmo ever?

I agree 100%. As much as people like to bash it, WoW is a very well made game and it set the bar very high in terms of polish and profit. It wasn't the most innovative game out there either so I think these developers get it into their heads that since Blizz just copied other games and made them better in WoW, perhaps they could do the same. And of course the publishers think that they're going to have millions of subscribers like WoW when back in the old days, EQ was considered an MMO juggernaut with a fraction of that.

It's just not going to work anymore. WoW is the Wii of MMOs. It's very accessible and therefore has a huge casual fanbase just forking over cash. I just don't think you can reproduce that kind of phenomenon.

It's been a while since the EA meat grinder demanded another sacrifice.

WoW didn't kill swtor. Swtor was killed by a combination of corporate bullshit and developer stupidity (and stubbornness).

You can't talk up "story story story" for years preceding the game and then launch with shitty, childish stories. Some of the stories are like a 12 year old wrote them. That's corporate bullshit.

Launching without UI customization: Stupid
Launching without Macros: Stupid & Stubbornness
Launching with no PVP Plan: Stupid & Stubbornness
PVP endgame loot plan: Stupid & Stubbornness
PVE endgame loot plan: Stupid

They thought they knew MMOs better than MMO players ... guess what ... they don't. The community knows what's stupid. We told them it was stupid and they responded with arrogance, stubbornness and corporate bullshit. That's what killed swtor; not WoW.

It just didn't feel much like an MMO to me. I gave it two weeks. Problem was I forget to unsubscribe and got billed after the free month was up. Managed to catch it just a few days before they were about to bill me again. I was one of the, what appears to be, huge numbers of people that dropped off at that point.

I believe they 'opted out' they definately didn't 'quit' or other such ugly terms.

I believe the politically correct term is "gameplay separation."

I believe the term is, 'involuntary payroll reduction program'. Are these not the normal 'layoffs' companies do after a launch? Then again the game is a pile of shit shoved into a box...

I just cancelled tonight. I hadn't played in weeks and I wasn't interested in quest grinding any more. Story alone isn't enough when the game play is so damn boring.

Gameplay was just not there for me in this one. Having a million skills around my bar that are far too similar with no way to group them up as I can in Rift.

I don't mind the grind, but the combat felt boring. Good luck to the rest of the team.