A rumor posted yesterday on Joystiq regarding layoffs occurring at Mythic Entertainment led to a fan forum frenzy that Mythic head Mark Jacobs couldn't help but respond to.
Mark Jacobs isn't known for being quiet, so when his forums explode with panicked players worrying about the state of Mythic's Warhammer Online, he did what he could to clarify the situation.
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.
Yes, when EA says they are laying off 1,000 employees, they weren't just talking EA proper. They've got a rather big company, in case you hadn't noticed, so of course the satellite development studios are likely to get hit.
That, and an MMO development team is generally going to trim down a bit as the player base begins to settle down and they switch from full-on development to maintenance and updating, so really this shouldn't be much of surprise, and it definitely isn't anything Warhammer fans should panic over.
Mark Jacobs Posts In "Mythic layoffs affect QA, customer support" [Warhammer Alliance Forums]