NCsoft properties, unite! Press release.

[ei8th]

Originally Posted by BahamutKaiser

Hopefully this means they will fix GW, A.net really disappointed me with their half finished product.

What, in gods good name, are you talking about? oO

Originally Posted by Kaldur

Layoffs don't always mean "Doom", but just cutting out the "rough edges".

Layoffs may not spell out the word "Doom," but it does mean that each remaining employee will be responsible for more work. So an already small team, working on a project, will now be smaller and with more pressure to deal with deadlines. In this case, then, game releases get pushed back and back.

Layoffs always have some kind of financial reason. Either a) the company is struggling with financing its endeavors or b) some higher-up is trying for a bigger bank.

[BahamutKaiser]

Most of the time when a company consolidates, merges, and lays people off, it just means they are cutting out the unneccessary and unproductive members like sub management, auxilery support, and dead weight. Unless production and sales go down, the actual devleopers and designers will probably be retained for the most part, they would have to drop projects or share them with existing staff in order to drop actual producers, so if they do drop actual developers it's probably something that would have happened anyway, maybe a dropped or failed project is the reason they are merging?