This comes after several days of uncertainty when management informed employees last week that there would be a restructuring along with a reduction in force; a move coming down the corporate ladder from South Korean parent company NCSoft as a result of declining revenue from their aging franchises and most notably, an increase in operating costs in the west.
The restructuring part has portions of ArenaNet being merged back into the NCSoft West subsidiary (functional roles that are probably duplicative in nature like operations, marketing, community management, etc); this doesn’t take much reading between the lines to know this is being driven by parent NCSoft.
While ArenaNet has not specified an exact number, personnel that survived todays cut noted the number of people let go were at least a hundred (the company had approximately 400 employees). The company notes that the game service for both Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 won’t be affected by the restructuring and downsizing (read between the lines; it’s the usual “do more with less” philosophy that many companies are pushing).
What is not known at this time is how much game designer staff were let go as that will provide some insight as to how projects related to content will fare as it relates to expansion content for Guild Wars 2 (some believe that side projects which were in the works were cut first).
Saying it has been a rough month for the video game industry would be an understatement given this and the layoffs that happened at Activision Blizzard.
