by Stacy Jones on Jul 16, 2010
Even mega gaming giants like Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) isn't immune to employee cutbacks. It was recently learned that SOE has cut 4% of its total full-time workforce, which is about 35 people. SOE explained that the move was to better align the company's resources to meet consumer demand and improve operational efficiency.
SOE isn't the only developer to cut back its staff this year. Second Life creator Linden Lab scaled back its staff by 30% back in June and Icarus Studios suffered layoffs back in May.
Massively also picked up on a few former SOE developer posts over at EQ2Flames that thank the community for their support and are currently looking for work. Affected by the layoffs are EverQuest II, who apparently lost Brett "Timetravelling" Scheinert and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, who lost William "Wigin" Bidermann, Jason "Ikik" Weimann, and Joel "Raijinn" Sasaki. This is more bad news for the Vanguard community, which recently had all its remaining servers merged down to one after suffering a healthy cutback in the game's planned content.
As always or best wishes go out to those affected by the layoffs.