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SOE layoffs hit Planetside 2 developers; “We stand by PS2 despite some people no longer being at the team”

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When the cruel winds of Thursday morning brought news of SOE’s recent round of layoffs, it seemed that the Planetside 2 team had escaped unscathed – at the expense of the DC Universe lot, customer service and general QA.

Not quite. A readably saddened John Smedley took to the Planetside forums to tell players that, yes, some of the men and women who pieced together Auraxis no longer work at the studio. But he denied the shake-up would impact development, asserting that SOE “have a large team still working on it”.

“Yes some people have been let go from the team,” wrote CEO Smedley. “They did terrific work and it’s just simply a cost cutting issue.

“There are many people with theories on why stuff like this happens. I can tell you this very simply – we make the best games we can and as a company I can say with a straight face that we do our absolute best to minimize the times when we need to do layoffs like this. They absolutely suck. However we do our absolute best to get people placed with good companies and we absolutely hire people back.

“I don’t much like the boilerplate statements companies make these days, ours included,” Smedley went on, “so I wanted to come on here and let you know we stand by PS2 and our other games and despite some people no longer being at the team we are working hard on the optimizations and the other features we have promised. We are making good progress and we intend to have a full status update next week.”

Smedley confirmed that Planetside 2 is otherwise “doing well”: “These cuts were SOE wide. They were necessary to get our costs in line with our revenues. Simple as that.”

The war must go on. How many of you lot are still regularly getting stuck into skirmishes in Planetside?