Swtor Layoffs begin

EA announced they were planning to lay off about 10% of its workforce in April and it appears they've finalized the SWTOR specific layoff.  We don't know the exact numbers but I've heard the SWTOR team has about 400 people so anything above 100 would be catastrophic and a clear sign they have given up. Here's the official announcement:

Hey folks, since you’re reading this you may likely have heard that we’ve done some restructuring here on the SWTOR team. Sadly, we are bidding farewell to some talented, passionate and exceptionally hard-working people who helped make SWTOR a reality. Impacting people’s lives this way is always very hard, but we’re ensuring the affected people are treated with dignity, fairness and respect.

Looking back at launch, we all came together and did something historic. We executed one of the largest, most successful and stable launches of any MMO yet in industry history. That is not an easy feat for any development team or company and we are humbled and honored by our fan community’s strong support both at launch and beyond.

Looking forward, the studio remains vibrant and passionate about our many upcoming initiatives for Star Wars: The Old Republic. We still have a very substantial development team working on supporting and growing the game, and we feel we are in a strong position, with your continued involvement and feedback, to continue to build Star Wars: The Old Republic as one of the most compelling and successful online experiences in the world today. There are many strong initiatives planned for cool new content and new features that we’re excited to tell you about in the upcoming weeks and months.
Rest assured that we remain dedicated to delivering a high quality service in SWTOR to you, our fans, and we will continue to support and grow Star Wars: The Old Republic over the weeks, months and years to come.
Thanks,
Greg and Ray

As I said in the article a few weeks back SWTOR subscriptions are going to fall past the 1.3mm they current have to at least 800k by year end.  That's the best case in my opinion and could go as low as 500k (I doubt it goes lower than that unless Bioware pulls the plug or really does some stupid things).

We've heard the break-even is between 500,000 and 1,000,000 subscription so it is obvious they are planning for the worst.  The unfortunate thing is the game has mostly fixed cost so if they are laying off that people in the content creator group is a sign that they are putting the brakes on future development.

Looking at it another way let's assume that it is 100 people and they cost $100,000 each.  That's a savings of $10,000,000 annually which would reduce the breakeven to 10MM / ($15 x 12 months) or 55.6k subscriptions.  It's a nice start but it's not enough to save them.  That's where closing 60+%
 of their servers would be helpful but unfortunately they don't have the code developed to make this happen.

Sadly, I think it may be safe to say that any chance this game had at having a large market share is gone.  What remains to be seen is if they can remain a minor player or become gaming's latest cautionary tale of what happens when management and the developers are out of touch with the reality of their business.