At ArenaNet, the developer of Guild Wars 2, layoffs of employees are occurring. The reason for this seems to be the decline in revenue and delays in new projects.
How many employees will be laid off? Officially, there are currently no numbers on how many employees are to be laid off. However, according to the US site Kotaku, it is expected to be a larger number.
Why are employees being laid off? The reason for the layoffs, according to Songyee Yoon, the CEO of the Korean publisher NCSoft, includes not only the decline in revenue from last year.
At NCSoft, there seems to be dissatisfaction with new projects from ArenaNet. In addition to Guild Wars 2, at least one mobile game was being worked on behind the scenes. There were apparently delays there.
Furthermore, NCSoft cites higher costs in the West as a reason to restructure the NCWest division. Alongside Guild Wars, Blade & Soul, Aion: Legions of War, and Lineage II are also distributed there for the Western market. Last year, Wildstar was already shut down.
Is Guild Wars 2 affected by the layoffs?
Which developers will be laid off specifically has not yet been determined. However, ArenaNet has commented on this in its own forum.
ArenaNet maintains its planned course: They confirmed the work on the Living World Season 4 and the subsequent Season 5. Additionally, more major updates for the game are planned.
In a statement to Gamesindustry, ArenaNet emphasized that the layoffs would not affect the services of Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2.
NCSoft is getting more involved: It is clear that NCSoft will take over the publishing of Guild Wars 2 again and that the companies will be getting closer together. ArenaNet is a subsidiary of NCSoft but had a lot of freedom in decisions recently.
Is Guild Wars 2 already running on low power? Former employee Jessica Price also spoke up on Twitter. She was laid off last year after a sexism debate on Twitter and was not very favorable towards her former employer afterward.
For her, the news about the layoffs is not surprising. She speaks of two new projects alongside Guild Wars that have already taken up a lot of developer time.
It appears that employees from Guild Wars 2 have gradually been pulled away as others were supposed to outwardly give the impression that everything was proceeding as usual.
In reality, however, the teams were already very small.
Are the layoffs surprising? The particularly tragic aspect of the situation is that ArenaNet had reacted to the layoffs at Blizzard. They even offered these positions to their own team.
At that time, probably no one knew that soon jobs at ArenaNet would also be cut.
