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Lord of the Rings Online: Turbine Hit with Layoffs
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
According to a confirmed report at GamesIndustry.biz, Lord of the Rings Online developer, Turbine, has been hit with a round of layoffs as part of restructuring by Warner Bros. Interactive. The exact number of employees affected remains unknown.
Massachusetts-based Turbine, Inc. is undergoing a round of layoffs, parent company Warner Bros. Interactivement Entertainment has confirmed. The MMO developer known for games like Asheron's Call and The Lord of the Rings Online is currently working on the MOBA Infinite Crisis.
"As part of our normal business process, we're routinely looking at the strategic alignment of our company," a Warner Bros. representative told Joystiq. "Unfortunately, in order for us to invest in growth areas at Turbine, we have to eliminate some positions. These are always tough decisions, which we don't approach lightly, but it's crucial that Turbine is structured in a way that reflects the current and coming marketplace."
Read more at the link above.
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Interesting...
I thought that they were supposed to be making "a lot more money" on Lotro since the F2P conversion. Has that situation changed?
Where else could they cut staff, surely not on the new MOBA development team ?
Roses are red
Violets are blue
The reviewer has a mishapen head
Which means his opinion is skewed
...Aldous.MF'n.Huxley
LOTRO has had a great run - it's only natural it will begin its final decline now.
Surprised it has lasted this long really. F2P really breathed life into it.
Such a shame that Turbine isn't progressing with another MMO and they keep focusing on their mediocre MOBA.
I self identify as a monkey.
Such as?
All I see are 3 old declining MMOs and a poor MOBA .
Turbine makes the game yes, but Warner ultimately has control. LOTRO has one of the best communities in MMOs right now. I think it would be sad to see it die.
More likely, TW is probably shooting for the console and cellular / tablet market and is in the process of changing up the composition and focus of the development team. I'm seeing this alarming trend lately that companies don't really want to pursue PC games anymore and want to branch into the more lucrative console / android markets. While the PC market is no slouch, it seems these companies are unwilling to cater to both, so we may lose out in the end.
Find work real soon.
I think they've been bleeding talent for a while. The difference in quality of updates between Moria and everything that came after was unreal.
Imo SoM was the last good update/zone added.
rise of isengurd was good expantion , land and raids.
LOTRO as a game, is bad! Very bad actually. No offense to the fans, but I would be really happy if Turbine loses the IP to a company who can really make a good LOTR MMO.
Or .. if Warner will shutdown and re-make the MMO with a professional staff and not make the same mistake to copy WoW. Yes yes .. "...but is not WoW". It is! I was very disappointed when I played LOTRO in beta and saw a poor copy of WoW.
If it wasn't bad, the game would have been a STAR right now, because the IP is .. well .. not big , but .. insane big.
Oh well, one can dream to see a real LOTR MMO!
Reporter: What's behind Blizzard success, and how do you make your gamers happy?
Blizzard Boss: Making gamers happy is not my concern, making money.. yes!
At least the players were happy they got to play for " free "..............right................
All the korean localized games have been closing and consolidating on a monthly basis for the last year or so. It is just about time for the big names to follow suit.
This. The classes revamp was completely unecessary and pissed off so many People. Especially since there were plenty of other issues with the game (introduced With the later updates at the time) that were left unchecked.
They also half assed it, with the whole debacle of the hotbar reset every time you switch between builds. Even after the rain of complaints on this, they never bothered to fix it!
The Whole Epic Battle system was also a joke of a dissapointment. Which they could have made better if they didn´t Waste all those resources on revamping all the classes.
And then the biggest issue. Their Complete neglect of real Group content! The Group Dungeons were one of the key strengths of this game. Turbine was great in this and each Dungeon in LOTRO was interesting and fun.
Now since more than two years, they completely abandoned Group instance content altogether! Only driving more players away.
Such a shame!
So I am not suprised that most of these layoffs are happening within the LOTRO team... and like another poster said, it probably won´t be long till this game gets shutdown now. /shrug
I think (but only a guess of course, there's no actual numbers out yet) it's more like IC than LotRO. It will affect LotRO too (a few people already stated their leave), but I guess this move is mainly due to the arriving IC launch.
At the start of 2014 they made a big restructuring / layoff which lowered the numbers in all games (AC, DDO and LotRO) in favor of IC, some said even that because of that there was no big expansion in LotRO this year, just two major updates. During the year a lot of folks worked on IC (rumours said about 40-50% of Turbine as a whole, which is a lot). Now that IC will go live from open beta, a part of those folks will be without a workload. Sadly it seems WB won't redirect them back to the former places...
Since Suzie placed it under the LotRO section: my guess would be, concerning LotRO, no big expansion in 2015 either... with the current (or even a bit lower) numbers I think they will continue this year's "updates and smaller maintenance fixes" route. Which is not a good news, at least imo.
My brother was able to recover his old account long time after the official period finished. All he has to do was contact the support and cooperate.
This would be great because I'd love to play a good MMO with LotR setting again. For me Lotro went downhill very fast after Moria.