Mark Jacobs on Mythic Layoff Rumors

Jan 20, 2009

Responding to layoff rumors that Mythic Entertainment would potentially lose half of its developers, Mythic CEO Mark Jacobs has called the speculation "total nonsense."

Addressing vnboards.ign.com community members, Jacobs wrote in a thread:

"Folks,

Two things to keep in mind:

1) Our CEO JR has publicly stated the need to cut costs across all of EA. This statement is old news and applies all throughout EA.

2) As part of EA, all studios are expected to do their fair share to meet the expectations of our CEO.

It isn't any more complicated than that other than to say that we have a very large studio and pretty much every person there has been and will continue to work on WAR for quite a while (meaning we haven't started work on another game yet). When we launched, we had over 400+ people working on the game in one capacity or another so it's not like we had a small team at launch or even a small team now.

Oh, and the whole (OMG, we're losing 1/2 the developer (or even of the total team) thing) is total nonsense. This is one of the times I really, really wish I could comment more than I can but if you look at what JR has said in terms of *cost* cutting, that should give you a good idea about what is happening throughout EA."

While the Electronic Arts-published MMO managed to garner a fifth spot on NPD group's best-selling PC games of 2008 list, EA has had to implement some cost-cutting initiatives during this economic recession. These measures not only affect developer Mythic Entertainment, but roughly 10% of the publisher's subsidiary companies as well. Late last year, EA announced the closure of Black Box, the development studio behind the Need for Speed and Skate games.