Petursson has been contacted personally by ”many CEOs in the industry” looking to help those let go, which is a ”great thing to see.” Aren’t abandoning them.
”This is a major thing, and it’s something which it is my responsibility to avoid,” declared Hilmar Petursson in an interview with Gamasutra over the 20 percent reduction in workforce. The studio’s other MMO, World of Darkness, is considerably affected.
”I’ve personally been contacted by many CEOs in the industry which have offered to help with finding employment for the people who are leaving, and that’s a great thing to see. So we are connecting people with our industry friends, we are helping them with their resumes, we are helping them to make contacts, and things like that,” he continued.
It’s great to hear that despite the misery of videogame developers being made redundant, there are opportunities being made available others hungry for more talent. It’s not uncommon for a studio to let staff go after a major project has been completed.
”We lost focus on taking care of EVE, and it became more important for us to battle-test features in our strategic roadmap by adding them to EVE, rather than adding value to EVE,” Petursson admitted. ”At some point we were just spreading ourselves too thin, and we were not focused enough on EVE Online, for sure.”
”It’s a trap which we basically fell into – where we thought we could achieve three impossible things at the same time,” he said. That would be EVE Online, PlayStation 3 MMO Dust 514 and the new pre-production MMO World of Darkness.
”Now we really have to focus as a company on just really showing our commitment to EVE Online, and giving the game the love from CCP which people claim we have lost,” he said. Plans for out-of-ship gameplay in EVE via the Incarna update ”will now not be a big priority for us; the biggest priority is EVE Online, the spaceship game.”
Are you glad to hear CCP Games is sticking with EVE Online’s core principle?
