Guild Wars 2 its probably in hot water with all the Anet Layoffs...

Pelagato

I will try to be brief and straight to the point. I do think GW2 is in deep trouble or is going to be soon with the recent news about incoming layoffs. You see its not about a single thing going on, its more about assembling the pieces of the puzzle.


Here are a few reasons and points of interests (pun intended).


1. No expansion in the horizon, so we don't know when the next influx of cash is going to be. New stuff sells really good from what I know. Its kind of general behaviour, out with the old, in with the new.

2. 400+ employees and trying to recruit ex-blizzard employees via social media. As it is, the company only runs GW and they have all those people working in there. Do you need 400+ employees to make the living season episodes? Really?

3. Let's say they are working in other projects, for how long and how good are those projects? How it comes we don't know anything about it, I do understand the hype train is dangerous but for the love of god, at least tell us the project name.

4. If you have to trim down, then why cancel the new projects instead of taking some meat away from gw2 considering is kinda old. Again, new stuff sells, right?

5. If they do believe GW2 should be the focus and the only way to go, then what the heck is wrong with them... No word on any expansion and they keep turning away the idea of new races and classes. I guess they can't release a new expansion without making 9 elite specializations, which are like subclasses.


In conclusion, I am under the impression that ArenaNet is growing too much and is squandering money, they became some sort of elitist group within the confines of their offices. NCSoft had enough and now they are exerting their authority as publishers. Who knows if Anet accepted more money out of NCSoft for a new project that never materialized and now they put GW2 on the line.

Thupli

I think ncsoft changed its mind and cancelled the mobile game anet was working on to have someone else in ncsoft make it. Likely they are centralizing mobile gaming in ncsoft.

Kyleran

Thupli said:

I think ncsoft changed its mind and cancelled the mobile game anet was working on to have someone else in ncsoft make it. Likely they are centralizing mobile gaming in ncsoft.

Either that or if ANET was working on a more traditional MMO perhaps NCsoft has decided there isn't enough of a return on the investment to bother with continuing.  

Or maybe ANET was like most every other MMO dev team today, unable to keep to a solid timeline and within budget. 

Indie devs might be able to get away with such, but in the corporate world such things matter more and many projects get cancelled when teams fail to prove they are able to keep on track.

Pelagato

So the mobile game Anet was suppose to make was meant to be a NA title or kind of a Korean-Asian thing?

Because if NCSoft had Anet making an Asian oriented game, I guess they didnt learned anything from the first iteration of Tabula Rasa so many years ago.

Ser_Ullsaard

This is actually something major game companies do on the regular. They hire huge numbers of staff to create their projects. Keep the best ones safe, then they lay off everyone else when the project is done or at a point where sustaining huge numbers just doesn't make sense. 

Normally this lines up with other companies that are hiring and with the use of social media now it's easier than ever for them to get new jobs with better pay. But the trick for them is to pay attention to the group size once again. 

dekkion1

ehhhhh....
i had a very nice run with gw2 5000hrs plus.
it will always remain on my hard drive lol.
but from what i can see alot of peeps are jumping ship and jumping on yoshi p's tip.
FF14 is alive and kicking i like it.

immodium

Ser_Ullsaard said:

This is actually something major game companies do on the regular. They hire huge numbers of staff to create their projects. Keep the best ones safe, then they lay off everyone else when the project is done or at a point where sustaining huge numbers just doesn't make sense. 

Normally this lines up with other companies that are hiring and with the use of social media now it's easier than ever for them to get new jobs with better pay. But the trick for them is to pay attention to the group size once again. 

Usually mass layoff happen AFTER they release something. To my knowledge the last expansion they released was Path of Fire in 2017.

After reading a few articles regarding this It sounds more likely they're struggling financially and need to let people go.

Ser_Ullsaard

Yes of course those things happen too, but you would see less of that if they didn't hire and try to retain hundreds of people. 
Plus they were working on other games as well and blew their budget because like many game companies they try to do everything in complete secrecy and can't keep people interested in what they have going. 

Shaigh

  Worst part of the layoffs was knowing that we shouldn't expect something new coming out of ArenaNet for a long time. They probably had good reasons to cut their existing projects because they weren't good enough, it happens all the time but at some point something new has to come out or they will just fade away until nothing remains.

At least they didn't make any battle royale games.

Asch126

Shaigh said:

  Worst part of the layoffs was knowing that we shouldn't expect something new coming out of ArenaNet for a long time. They probably had good reasons to cut their existing projects because they weren't good enough, it happens all the time but at some point something new has to come out or they will just fade away until nothing remains.

At least they didn't make any battle royale games.

They flatout said they would go straight into the next Living World season, so we can expect something, just don't expect it to be good after they decided to forego an expansion.