From what I'm reading, it seems the problem is that Anet was working on projects that didn't pan out. So GW2 was making money, but those projects cost money with nothing to show for it. If devs hadn't been moved from GW2 to those projects, maybe we would have gotten another expansion?
It's quite possible, historically (during late GW1 expansion development, early GW2) people were pulled on and off of projects depending on what was behind schedule. There was a lot of "Gw2" or "next gw1 expansion after this one" work going on in parallel with current expansion work once the studio got bigger, and sometimes the current-expansion work would go into panic mode and people got pulled off next-expansion/gw2. I forget whether it ever happened in the reverse direction, but those next-expansion teams were pulled from people who previously would've been working on current-expansion stuff. A lot of them were leads/senior staff, for what I hope are obvious reasons - best and brightest doing pre-production etc. Some of the stuff from late Gw1 expansion plans ended up getting rolled into Gw2.
On a side note, I always wondered why they did not bring GW to consoles.
It could have worked fine.
Gw2 console was in development at least once with a small separate team. It got cut while I was managing another team, but I was never privy to the reasons why since console was firewalled off. I would guess it wasn't turning out how people wanted so it was hard to justify the cost. Console limitations could have been part of it since the PS4/XBOne era was not in full swing then, and making gw2 work well on ps3/360 seems like a tough challenge especially given what I know about how gw2 works.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-02-21-arenanet-reportedly-bracing-for-mass-layoffs
According to this the developers who were working on the unannounced projects seem to the be ones that will be layoff while the GW2 development part of ArenaNet is mostly unaffected. Although Jessica Price, the writer who was fired last year in the controversy, seemed to claim that GW2 development was seemingly winding down and they were pulling people to other projects and trying to trick people into thinking they had more.
Unsure if we should take her word on it.
Should be noted the whole final instance for All or Nothing was on a crazy scale seen in new MMOs.
Ultimately if most are laid off (there's 400 people there), then this would support what Price is saying. Though it's possible also that they will lay off a lot but then others on other projects will be back to GW2.
People getting pulled off GW2 maintenance/etc to work on new projects definitely makes sense if those new projects were big bets. At this point in GW2's lifespan, doing dev with a skeleton crew for a while is viable (even if inadvisable). It makes sense to pivot to something else given how the PC and MMO markets are these days - for example, it would have made a ton of sense if they had a mobile project in the works. This is a complete guess, however - I don't have any knowledge about what the projects would've been. Console could've made sense too but doesn't seem like a growth move to me.
It begins. They're really going after people who have the largest salaries and institutional memory.
Senior staff are a big cost savings for anet to cut because of the way their tenure-based profit sharing works (though it wouldn't surprise me if profit sharing isn't a big expense for them anymore, because historically anet could burn money from the profit-sharing pool on things like office expansions). Junior staff (even if hired at high base salaries) didn't earn out much under the system. I wouldn't be surprised if new staff were also getting hired at lower salary levels than what people of equivalent titles were getting paid due to a history of promotions, but who knows. A lot of the cuts don't seem like easy targets to me either, because in addition to being senior some of those people had relatively unique skill sets and/or knowledge that will be hard for the studio to replace with new hires. Handing that knowledge/skill off to other people in-studio isn't something they've ever excelled at.
This is more speculation based on personal experience/knowledge about Current Leadership but it also wouldn't surprise me if cutting senior staff is done for morale and leadership reasons. People who have been around at that studio longer tended to be more willing to push back on management decisions and have a better sense of how things needed to work, and that ended up being important when the environment at the studio got tense (as happened a few times). Sometimes tension resulted in senior staff leaving in the past, though never like this. The closest thing would have been the chunk of departures that eventually led to the formation of Undead Labs.
There's a related effect here where senior departures tend to result in people who worked with them leaving too. I'm told that has happened here in a couple key spots, which is really unfortunate - it happened with the UL departures.
damn, i liked SAB.
gaile gray is also gone too
Gaile being out is shocking to me since AFAIK she was around the studio from near the beginning - pre-E3-demo, pre-visual-overhaul, etc. I think probably first 10 employees? I was always under the impression that she was basically protected because she was friends with the founders. Personal grievances aside she was pretty good at her job so losing her is a big hit.
I think we should wait instead of immediately calling GW2 a dead game? As far as I remember, the game itself is still doing fine. Spreading doom and gloom isn't the right call.
Yeah, this doesn't seem like it reflects on the health of GW2 at all. It has to be about cost cutting and stopping the bleeding from what NCSoft viewed as unprofitable investments in... whatever those other projects were. It wouldn't be the first time, and GW2's obscenely prolonged development (with like a dozen missed milestones) was catastrophically expensive to a point that I suspect NCSoft management are more sensitive to an anet project looking like it's going south at this point.
Anyway, %*(#% Mo. I'm really bummed off and kinda angry about this. The whole 'we're a family' gimmick about studios is always 90% a lie but the anet crew were really tightly-knit, especially the people who'd been around for 5+ years. It hurts to see those bonds torn apart like this for what are basically studio mismanagement reasons. Seems like it's happening a lot lately.
