cutback
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Blackstar's future in jeopardy
Budget cuts. Layoffs. It seems a fairly common thing in the general news lately, and sadly, the MMO genre appears to be no less susceptible to the current hard times. News came down the wire yesterday that Spacetime Studios have been forced to release half of their staff -- and we imagine that this will cause the development of Blackstar to slow down accordingly. According to the Spacetime Studios blog, "[they] have been shopping Blackstar around but - right now, at least – the concept of a SciFi space/ground IP has proven to be a challenge. Our studio cannot survive at its current burn rate without a publishing deal..." Considering we've seen quite a few studios hit by either cutbacks or shutdowns in the last year, we're concerned by what this seemingly implies. With the current popularity of World of Warcraft and other MMOs; strong soon-to-be-published titles like Warhammer Online; and news of more and more titles coming out seemingly every other day (especially if you count the Asian market) it is a good time for MMOG players. On the other hand, the heavy market saturation means an extremely competitive market where some good ideas may sadly not find their way off the drawing board. The hope is that Spacetime Studios can find a publishing deal for Blackstar soon. We are definitely interested in seeing more from their studio, if their concept art and ideas are any indication of what things may come. If you'd like to check out a short clip of Blackstar's alpha, be sure to join us after the break!%Gallery-23010%
Nokia Siemens Networks drops the axe on 9000 jobs
While this doesn't come as a huge surprise -- this layoff was predicted last year -- it still hurts to see such massive cutbacks in an industry held so near and dear to our hearts. Apparently 2,900 jobs in Germany and 1,700 in Finland will be cut on the road to finding savings to the tune of $2 billion by 2010. The final cut will be about 9,000 employees which is roughly 15 percent of the joint venture's workforce of 60,000. The joint venture was founded to help both companies compete with the likes of Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent with 5 major business units focusing on Radio Access, Broadband Access, Service Core and Applications, IP / Transport, and Operations Support Systems. Of course, the verdict is still out on how successful this venture will ultimately be, but Nokia's track record in the mobile space has been strong for as many years as we care to remember.
