EVE Online studio CCP Games has announced the closure of its San Francisco office, this was announced yesterday in a press release as part of an effort to “merge and streamline” its operations. This comes after they made the decision to end development of the World of Darkness MMO last April, an MMO based on a popular table top role playing game, after almost a decade of development. Perhaps more significantly, it has also lost the services of its chief financial officer and chief marketing officer as they were not willing to relocate to Iceland. San Francisco; hot, sunny, trams, a bridge and full of beautiful womenbeaches I really can’t see why they wouldn’t want to leave.
CCP broke the news in its latest financial statement, which you can read in its entirety here, points to note; it’s in Icelandic so if google translate will fix this, A rough translation shows it to state that “revenue and margin in the first half of the year were stable compared to the same period last year and marketing and general operating expenses declined.” On the downside, pulling the plug on World of Darkness “resulted in considerable costs due to the termination provisions, depreciation and write-downs of particular intangible assets.”
“As part of our plans to combine and simplify our business in key operational company, we will soon say goodbye to two of the Company’s management, Joe Gallo and CFO David Reid, who are located outside the cities CCP has offices in. ” CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson said in the translated report. “Joe Gallo and David Reid have done a great job for the CCP and I wish them all the best for the future.”
The also go on to reassure fans that development of eve online and all its tie in games are going strong, let’s just hope they don’t repeat the mistakes they made in the development of World of Darkness in their other new ventures.
As the CMO, Reid was relatively well-known among EVE fans thanks to interviews about EVE Valkyrie and the future of virtual reality. In a tweet following the announcement, he said that he was not laid off but chose to leave the company to get away from the constant traveling between the US and Iceland; CCP clarified that Gallo also opted to leave voluntarily.