The economic recession is starting to take its toll on all branches of the entertainment industry, games not being spared. We have recently seen that a lot of independent game studios have been experiencing very tough situations, with Factor 5 or Free Radical already approaching their own demise. The crisis hasn't even spared big companies, as Sony has already cut a lot of jobs in order to maintain a profit.

We've reported on the fact that Electronic Arts is continuing its cost-cutting measures, and that positions from various studios that make games for the company are enduring the consequences. As such, some employees from the Tiburon and Mythic Entertainment studios will be laid off, in order for the studios to maintain a decent profit and continue developing new titles.

The fact that the studio responsible for the very popular Warhammer Online MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game), Mythic Entertainment, will be a victim of those layoffs has sparked a lot of heated debate on the forums of the game, as players are worried that this measure will affect the quality of the online title. Mark Jacobs, the president of the studio, has posted a reply to these worries saying that the team responsible for WAR and now in charge of its support is a pretty big one and won't feel the departure of some of the employees.

“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.”

It's true that WAR now doesn't need the same big team it had when it was in development, as all the support team needs to do is watch the players and address the problems they encounter. Let's hope that things will improve for EA and that other layoffs won't be made in the future.