Last week was the biggest for Warhammer Online since their game shipped. This week we have good and bad news from EA and developer Mythic Entertainment. First, in EA’s third quarter fiscal year earnings report they mentioned that the game has exceeded the 300,000 paying subscriber mark; the figure includes players from both North America and Europe. In anticipation of rumors regarding staff reductions here at Mythic today, this seems like a good time to provide some insight into the future of development, customer service, quality assurance and play testing at Mythic. Though we are resizing the team to move from a pre-launch to a post-launch size, we remain fully committed to creating and delivering the best WAR experience.

The bad news is that Mythic is cutting half of its QA team and twenty-one customer service employees. While layoffs are never good, Mythic’s head honcho Mark Jacobs mentions that this is just a resizing of the team from a pre-launch staff to a post-launch. Mark Jacobs also blogged about the recent layoffs of his team and about Warhammer in general.Initially, Warhammer Online had around 500,000 subscribers when they launched, but the release of both the World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online expansions likely had a factor in the drop of subscribers for Mythic’s game.Mythic has always been committed to maintaining a high level of development and customer service to our MMO players.