Trouble for Carbine Studios As Large Number of Redundancies Announced

It’s very sad news at WildStardevelopers, Carbine Studios. With their MMO just not performing as well as they were hoping, the firm have been forced to lay off 70 staff. This figure comprises of around 40% of their workforce and the bad news doesn’t stop there as it’s predicted that more redundancies are imminent. In a statement issues via their official Wildstar forums, the developer announced:

“Earlier this morning, Carbine Studios completed a reorganization of its operating structure. Moving forward, the studio will focus on operating and updating WildStar as a live game in the US and Europe. As part of this change, the studio has cancelled its plans to bring WildStar to China.

Unfortunately, as a result of these changes, we've had to reduce staff. These cuts are directly tied to WildStar's evolution from a product in development to a live title, to the cancellation of work to bring WildStar to China, and to the overall performance of WildStar since launch in 2014.

These kinds of decisions are exceptionally difficult. The talented and passionate professionals who are impacted by these cuts have been valuable team members and respected colleagues. We wish everyone well for the future and will be providing severance and employment search assistance.

As for WildStar, we remain committed to the game. Over the next few weeks and months we will deliver a significant update to the game, kick off a variety of community events, and continue our work on new content that we will talk more about in the near future.”

Whilst the company are publically stating that they are confident in the future for WildStar, sources inside the company have suggested that confidence is not shared by many of the remaining staff members. Tech website Polygon had anonymous tip offs stating that further redundancy is expected and the future of the MMO is in doubt. One commentator even went as far as to say that it was only a matter of time before the game “'coasts into the sunset”.

Whilst this is a terrible shame, it’s not something which has come entirely out of the blue. WildStar released to a great deal of critical acclaim but it’s struggled since to match this with commercial success and subscriber numbers have consistently failed to meet expectations. Launching with a subscription model at a time when most other MMOs were Free-to-Play with microtransactions was seen by the company themselves and most industry onlookers as a big mistake, one that the company attempted to correct by transitioning to a free-to-play model last year. Seemingly though, that was too little, too late to save the developer from major problems.