Elder Scrolls Online Developer Faces Lay Offs

Zenimax Online Studios laid off a number of employees this past Wednesday. Pete Hines, VP of PR and Marketing for Bethesda, said,

As is the norm for games of this type, we had ramped up a large workforce to develop a game of vast scale and ramped up our customer service to handle the expected questions and community needs of the Elder Scrolls Online at launch.

Dropping staff may be seen as a bad move when the game still hasn’t realeased on the Xbox One or PlayStation 4. It appears that only customer service jobs took a hit in this wave of lay offs and development will continue as normal. Console fans likely won’t see the game until the end of the year. In order to alleviate any fears they might have, Hines continued,

We remain strongly committed to The Elder Scrolls Online, and continue to invest heavily to develop new content for PC players, prepare the game for its console launch and handle our planned expansion..

Players worried about any potential impact to development should consider that patches have been released regularly and add-ons such as the loyalty program for paying for the longer subscriptions have been added to the game since its debut.

Don’t panic just yet. It hasn’t even been released across all of its intended platforms and still charges a monthly subscription fee. Going free-to-play seems to be the move MMO’s make when they are in bad shape.