Massive Layoffs At Trion Today? Defiance Affected?

[WhiteCell]

IDK if it is business as usual or not. It seems to make sense that once you have released the final product of a game you wouldn't need those employees anymore but I've never worked in the game industry so I cant agree or disagree.

However, if the reason for layoffs is strictly financial, here are my 2 cents on the matter. F2P games rely on the store to help support them. Usually, when I find an MMO I like I support them by buying a few things from the store. I feel like I am doing what I can (since I can financially afford a few items here and there) to support patches and future content. I know not everyone can or wants to and I understand completely.

That being said, I have not bought one item from the Defiance store. I don't feel the items aren't worth the money. Prices seem a bit high to me and I can't bring myself to spend $10 on an outfit in another color. When they get a little bit more variety (and I'm sure they will) then I will be sinking money in to whatever interesting items they come up with.

Thing is Defiance is already setup for free to play. The gambling lock boxes, keys, limited economy, locked content, and boosts already make it free to play by design except they were foolish enough to ask $60 for it.

They obviously took their chances with trying to quickly recoup the insane development costs for such little content but it seems to have backfired for them.

[Shada Mori]

Right, so not as bad as the rumor says and not as trivial as the PR rep says. Who is PR.

That's a very large gulf in between the two. The fact that they let people go shows they broke tradition with the Rift launch, which is a poor sign of Defiance's performance as opposed to Rift's launch performance.

Basically this ^

Though I will point out in the Kotaku article .. granted from yet another dubious "Person connected to" source they state "triggered by the underwhelming performances of both Defiance and Rift's first expansion, Storm Legion." so its not ENTIRELY on Defiance.. though I have no doubt its a big part of it.

In any case I don't expect Defiance to go anywhere in any way anytime soon. The show was renewed for another season, preemptively the game along with it and with major companies providing backing.. Axe and Dodge.. its likely this is just a speed bump at most for Defiance at least for another year. I'm actually being a bit positive really about it, because like I said in my earlier post.. I think the Dev team probably has some dead weight and I think now they will be refocused a bit. Nothing like a round of lay offs to improve your job performance.

[DaMaJaDiZ]

Profits for the SyFy show are independent from the game, and the death of the game wouldn't necessarily mean the death of the show so I'm not at all sure that qualifies as any sort of "evidence".

Also, as far as experiments go... there may be some novel elements here, but this is hardly the first time content for a game (or something else) has been presented across multiple forms of media. There's even a name for it (that I can't remember at the moment).

The vast majority of the money used to get the game up was from Universal. Exactly who do you think owns this property? Who do you think are Trions biggest investors?

[Dandrielas]

Uh this is being flaunted as an "MMO". MMOs are never 'done', they keep on developing and hopefully getting better. Now that they have gutted most of the Defiance team...well, this won't end well. You need people to evolve an MMO, successful ones start hiring...failed ones start firing.

Trion did say they laid off some people, but not as much IGN is toting. At this point, all the doomsday people should take a breather and wait until more details come out that aren't made up.

[DaMaJaDiZ]

Trion did say they laid off some people, but not as much IGN is toting. At this point, all the doomsday people should take a breather and wait until more details come out that aren't made up.

Servers are up. Will play. *Shrug*

[WhiteCell]

Trion did say they laid off some people, but not as much IGN is toting. At this point, all the doomsday people should take a breather and wait until more details come out that aren't made up.

If you believe video game PR/Marketing then get ready to be lied too.

The story is true. They are attempting to marginalize it the best they can with vague non specific statements.

[Dandrielas]

If you believe video game PR/Marketing then get ready to be lied too.

The story is true. They are attempting to marginalize it the best they can with vague non specific statements.

I think it would be more foolish to believe a source with no facts backing him up. Especially from IGN who lies through the arse all the time.

[Writhen]

Servers are up. Will play. *Shrug*

Lol best idea I've heard so far

[ten4]

Trion did say they laid off some people, but not as much IGN is toting. At this point, all the doomsday people should take a breather and wait until more details come out that aren't made up.

Well I consider this game a 200 buck loss and that's about it. Not logged in 2 weeks except the 20 mins it required to do this awesome 'content' they released for last episode. Anyways, back to another B2P MMO that gives me content for free and did not have to fire most of their company which some of you think is normal. No, it is not normal to fire most of an MMO team shortly after launch, that is a bad thing. TB or APB anyone? lol.

[soarra]

This is not unusual in this state of the industry.

exactly, every mmo does this. Launch game, layoff people who are not needed to maintain game.