From the official forums for The Old Republic:

Hey folks, since you’re reading this you may likely have heard that we’ve done some restructuring here on the SWTOR team. Sadly, we are bidding farewell to some talented, passionate and exceptionally hard-working people who helped make SWTOR a reality. Impacting people’s lives this way is always very hard, but we’re ensuring the affected people are treated with dignity, fairness and respect.

Looking back at launch, we all came together and did something historic. We executed one of the largest, most successful and stable launches of any MMO yet in industry history. That is not an easy feat for any development team or company and we are humbled and honored by our fan community’s strong support both at launch and beyond.

Looking forward, the studio remains vibrant and passionate about our many upcoming initiatives for Star Wars: The Old Republic. We still have a very substantial development team working on supporting and growing the game, and we feel we are in a strong position, with your continued involvement and feedback, to continue to build Star Wars: The Old Republic as one of the most compelling and successful online experiences in the world today. There are many strong initiatives planned for cool new content and new features that we’re excited to tell you about in the upcoming weeks and months.

Rest assured that we remain dedicated to delivering a high quality service in SWTOR to you, our fans, and we will continue to support and grow Star Wars: The Old Republic over the weeks, months and years to come.

Thanks,

Greg and Ray

Sad to hear this and I hope those people bounce back and find work elsewhere. Isn't it crazy how SWTOR is considered one of the most successful and largest MMOs in history but WoW is so crazy that it looks like a failure in comparison. Nothing will ever come close to WoW again in MMOs or at least I don't think it will. I'm no Michael Pachter though.

Don't fix the game, just fire people until you can be profitable.

I wonder just how many people they laid off. I also wonder if ToR is going to go free to play in the near future, I keep hearing reports of empty servers, giant guilds that are suddenly ghost towns and so on.

wow, i had hoped we would get a few more years down the line before this sort of news started appearing, i really hope this isnt the beginning of the end. Despite everything, i really enjoy this game and the ability to change servers in the upcoming patch means i can play with a lot of my friends going forward, thats if the game is still around when they want to play. Im hopefull things start getting better...

I wonder if one of those "new features" they´re excited to tell us about will be the game going free to play..

Or maybe they make it even more like WoW. Who knows- the possibilities are endless :D

This makes me wonder how much more additional content will be added to the game in the future.

@Cloudenvy: The problem is peoples standards are far too high, demanding so much from the team and then whining and complaining when they don't get what they want. People are leaving the game for super dumb reasons, sure it doesn't have much end game content in comparison to The World of Warcraft but that's because WoW is fucking 8 years old, they've had time to add tons of content. SWTOR is only six months old, people complaining about a lack of content should really look at vanilla WoW.

@laserbolts said:

I'm no Michael Pachter though.

So it means you actually know what you're saying. ;)

Back on topic.

Seems natural to me since the major development is over and given the numbers they are getting it doesn't seem like they need to keep a large staff. Sucks for people to be loosing their jobs and I hope they bounce back.

I have no idea the number EA were expecting but given the amount of money they sank into this project then I think the numbers they wanted to get were much higher then what they actually got.

@SmasheControllers: Well, standards or not there doesn't seem to be a reason to hang around in ToR if it lacks end game content. Regardless of how long each game has been around, it only seems logical to go back to WoW.

I've never played ToR outside of the beta though, so what do I know.

I wish those people good luck finding their next gig. This is kind of expected though, right? The major development is done and now all that's left is updates, patches and smaller bits of content. I wouldn't use this as some kind of sign that the MMO is failing.

@Cloudenvy: I personally can never go back to WoW, too slow and boring. The voice acting adds a lot for me.

@Cloudenvy: The problem is peoples standards are far too high, demanding so much from the team and then whining and complaining when they don't get what they want. People are leaving the game for super dumb reasons, sure it doesn't have much end game content in comparison to The World of Warcraft but that's because WoW is fucking 8 years old, they've had time to add tons of content. SWTOR is only six months old, people complaining about a lack of content should really look at vanilla WoW.

@SmasheControllers: I'm not into either of them, so I'm not exactly qualified to speak about any of this!

@Jimbo: Completely, I love SWTOR. Granted I haven't played many MMO's but SWTOR is easily my favorite and I don't even like Star Wars that much, but the story did a lot for me.

@Jimbo: Completely, I love SWTOR. Granted I haven't played many MMO's but SWTOR is easily my favorite and I don't even like Star Wars that much, but the story did a lot for me.

@Jimbo: That's not it at all, though it seems that's what I meant. From seeing what people are saying through various fourms and even in-game people said they're leaving because the game is bad. By no means is the game bad, just lacking at the moment.

Don't fix the game, just fire people until you can be profitable.

It bums me out for sure. I really like the game. It has many shortcomings though and most gamers want the complete package plus more. I can't blame them. Mix an unfinished game(BW's fault) with a terrible community(not BW's fault) and you get mass exodus.

It is only like when a game ships you lay off staff. With an MMO when most of the kinks have worked out and numbers drop, you lay off support staff.

I wouldn't read too much into this, it seems to happen with most MMOs. That said, it was pretty clear that EA/Bioware did not want TOR to be 'most MMOs.'

@SmasheControllers said:

I personally can never go back to WoW, too slow and boring. The voice acting adds a lot for me.

It confounds me that someone could say WoW is slower than TOR. TOR is practically designed to be as slow as possible.

Edit: On topic, this isn't really surprising. I wish those laid off the best, but, this is probably rather standard fair for an MMO. You don't need everyone that helped build the game to keep running the game, and only need a fraction of the staff to make the new, additional content. Still, wishing the best for those laid off though.

When they have people leaving left and right due to lack of content and features, it seems to me that there is work to be done, firing people now is insane, why now and not 3 months from now when they are ahead of the ball rather than behind it?

If this isn't a white flag/one way trip to warhammerville I don't know what is.

And really, was there any reason for them to post about this whatsoever? it's completely baffling.

@Cloudenvy said:

I keep hearing reports of empty servers, giant guilds that are suddenly ghost towns and so on.

Very much so. I know that The Maw is virtually a dead server for Imperial, and I've heard the same from a lot of other places. The issue is that they haven't merged servers at all since launch...which is a BAD thing!

Star wars TOR update 1.3 : less employee's!

This doesn't seem too crazy. There has to be a smaller staff needed to maintain and add content to an MMO than is needed to launch one, right? Assuming an MMO isn't WoW then most of 'em must do this to a certain extent, even if they're relatively profitable.

+50 Dark Side Points.