The layoffs have me confused more then anything else. Help?

http://investor.ea.com/events.cfm?list=Past

Look at the latest EA transcription for the fiscal year



The fact that you say you're majoring in the field tells me you have a lot to learn about politically correct business terminologies as well as as the real work place. Citing stock price isn't helping your argument. You're slowly turning into another "JeramieCrowe"(sp?). When you start working for major corporations in the industry and have to sit through the all hands meetings, you will need to decipher the business terminologies to translate the meaning. Only the guinea pig would take those words for face value.

The 143% growth in subscriptions, advertising, and other revenue was driven by the December launch of STAR WARS - The Old Republic. Let me provide you with
an update on Star Wars. Through the end of the quarter approximately 2.4 million units have sold through. In our last call we indicated that we had 1.7 million active
subscribers, and as of the end of April, we now have 1.3 million, with a substantial portion of the decrease due to casual and trial players cycling out of the subscriber
base, driving up people who are all percentage of paying subscribers. We have already launched a number of initiatives designed to growth subscriptions. Initial
responses have been positive and we are encouraged by the gaming community's reaction.

You can't post on these forum if you don't have an active subscription.

Back to the topic. No, this is not good news. Layoffs are never a good sign of a healthy company that had good long term plans that were viable and implemented in a healthy way. This is not an indication of SW:TOR's health however, as the layoffs are part of a compny wide plan for EA. EA is not healthy, so they are trying to bring the company back to a state where they can continue with their current projects while meeting long term goals.

Basically, EA is doing what they have to do and cutting their losses. They already stated that SW:TOR is not part of their 'core projects' and is not expected to have any significant impact on their business. Sounds like spin, but it also sounds like this is not very important to them, and it shows.

People are leaving this game like rats off a sinking ship. It's not going to get better. Plan accordingly.

They are trimming away as much cost as possible. Now the game won't be shutting down anytime soon. It will keep running as long as it makes a profit, but any great content is over. EA will allow a couple of small updates a year just to keep things running while people are willing to play.

I can see why you didn't quote me as you apparently intended to misrepresent me. It'd be tough to do so when my words are right there next to your statements.

I do not need to 'misrepresent you to highlight your errant thinking

First off, I said make two GENERAL FORUMS. One would be for all those currently signed up for a recurring subscription (this would, obviously, exclude free trials & cancelled subscriptions). The other would be for everyone who had game access (both paid subscriptions AND free trials/cancelled subscriptions). I'd probably add a third that would be usable by anyone who had an account whether they were paying or not, or add this to the latter, so as to get the complaints & feedback from former subscribers or potential new subscribers about the concerns/complaints they have.

How can you possibly justify discriminating against one category of people that have paid the exact same amount of money for a service as another category? i.e recurring subscription not cancelled and recurring subscription cancelled whist both still active

The purpose of this was ONLY to make sure that the general forum still functioned as intended rather than serve as a sounding board for trolling. This obviously wouldn't cut down on all of it, but it would at least reduce it to a manageable level. Instead of deleting or censoring other users, it would instead be moved to the more open forum. If that became a sounding board for trolls, so be it, but at least there's a functioning alternative general forum.

the forum mods are actually pretty good at nerfing the real trolls and herding the general nay sayers into single threads per topic. It would seem to me that your definition of a troll is anyone with actual real life experience and knowledge that is not currently studying your books on a subject you have no hands on experience of

Might they be using this to pad subscriptions numbers instead? Sure, but it seems unlikely considering that the percentage of users with paying subscriptions rather than those with just game time was addressed in the shareholders' report, and that wouldn't be buffed by this practice. They honestly wouldn't gain much from it by comparison. (And by the way, every response I made had to do with this and already addressed this, so let's just chalk this up to another reason why you decided to avoid quoting me.)

Your not getting it are you? I am speaking about unsubbers with active accounts not free 30 day people.

Leave it to EA to ruin MMOs... Nothings changed I should of listened / learned from Earth and Beyond, UO, MotorCity, etc.... EA=Destroyer of MMOs!

Most projects like MMOs take large numbers of people to develop and deploy.

Post launch, the application can be maintained by a smaller number of people. Trust me when I say these layoffs have been planned for a long time. It wasn't just after the last investor meeting. Unless this game had 3 or 4 million people playing it, they were going to cut bodies regardless.

The lay offs are a result of 400k people quitting the game. There is no good spin on this even if they were contractors if the game had hit 11 million subs EA and BW would have kept them on to churn out new content to keep people playing I mean paying.

The only silver linning to this is that hopefully this will get the dev team to start listening to the customer base before they lose anbother 400k people. Althrough development people saying they don't owe us a thing they don't have to tell us anything did this game no favours as now its live and they need paying subscribers they haven't delivered a game people are happy with or willing to pay monthly for.

Now there is a good chance that many of the problems come from people that quit long ago, the choice over space combat, the option to go for cartoon like graphics as more and more AAA MMO are going for more and more realistic graphics. The choice of very limited species very limited customisation both at creation and with what can be worn. The lack of any real any game content and after dailies no single player end content while at the same time making grouping troublesome and time consuming.

The restructuring/layoffs is the first bit if SWTOR news that has actually left me concerned. I'm a diehard SWTOR fanboy with a 6 month sub. I still believe a good group finder, server transfers and ranked warzones can totally save this game.

Honestly this new announcement has me confused more then anything else. It might sound bizzare but I'm not even sure if this is a good or bad thing. I mean SWTOR has had issues, with things like development priorities, buggy patches, poor communication and the like. Isn't it possibly that their trimming the fat, moving people around and maybe even hiring one or two new smarty pants to FIX SWTOR not gut it? Or does this have to be 100% bad news?
I just don't know if I should be happy or sad and that's really annoying. I mean its always bad when people lose their jobs but if some of these people were just doodling all day their salaries can be better spend elsewhere. I'm not saying everyone sacked deserved it or anything.
I'm just not sure if this means DOOOOM or NEW HOPE or just alittle tighning of the belt to keep swtor profitable with less subscribers.


Can someone help me out here?