Asheron's Call transforming into a snowslide

Just a few days and the "sky is falling".

It started on Thursday of the last week. Arthur_Parker links to some rumors about AC2:

Developers down to two, support slashed to minimum people, and closure planned.

Just from talking to people that say they know a turbine employee and this is what is going on in AC2. This is AC2 only, all other projects are running normally.
The bad thing is I have heard this recently from two totally different people that live states apart. Both just happen to play other games I play.

Then he links together two other rumors. One says "Farewell Citan". The other says that "Perpetual Entertainment hired veteran developer Daron Stinnett as Executive Producer in May". The company now working on Star Trek Online.

Citan = Daron Stinnet, I guess.

Later the same day, we discover that the rumors are true and that AC2 is done. Along with the game, Turbine is shutting down the studio in Santa Monica:

Turbine reps tell GameSpot the studio will be officially shuttered concurrent with the shut down of AC2 in late December 2005.

Turbine staffers downplayed the connection between the two bits of news, stating the Santa Monica office was focused solely on the original Asheron's Call, released in 1999. The rep elaborated, stating all business-development functions had transitioned back to Turbine's headquarters in Westwood, Massachusetts, months ago.

He added that all 10 staffers in California will have the opportunity to relocate to Turbine's headquarters in Westwood.

Uhm, 10 staffers. I guess most of them left the building long ago.

More insights:

Stormwaltz:
How many of them moved from Mass to LA last year? Having done two cross-country moves in two years myself, I know the financial havoc it can wreak.

Mr. Poppinfresh:
The move was two years ago, and was all of the AC1 team as far as I know. That leaves a lot of people holding on to mortgages by now, I'd guess.

Now excuse me. AC2 is closing but noone is being laid off. All its devs are now working on DDO or LOTRO. The studio in Santa Monica is closing too. But then the studio in Santa Monica had only 10 people left in it. And working on AC1, not on the sequel.

It was rather obvious that more was to come.

Firstly we have the confirmation that Citan, executive producer of AC2, is indeed leaving Turbine.

Yesterday, the news that even AC1 may be in trouble.

Sandra "srand" Powers, formerly a Lead Engineer and Producer, leaves AC1 and puts someguy called Alex "Ibn" Beckers in her place:

I wanted to post to let you guys know that I am no longer with the Asheron’s Call 1.0 Live Team. My last day at Turbine was about a week ago.

Before I left, the team worked out a solid plan for the future: Alex “Ibn� Beckers was replacing me as Producer (yes, that’s why he was leaving the OCR position), the expansion had let us train up some really excellent engineers who now know the tech considerably better than I do (so engineering was taken care of), and the September update looked really amazing. I was looking forward to my final post – once we had all the details worked out – to say goodbye and let you know what the plan was going forward.

Unfortunately, things have changed a bit since then. I don’t have details, and I don’t have answers for you – I’m not with Turbine any more, so I’m not a good resource for those things. But I did want to post and say goodbye.

Just a few days later and even Ibn posts on the boards. Not to confirm his new role but to announce that he is leaving as well, how fun:

Way back in early 2003, I had a plan. I had some money saved up and I'd always wanted to try living in Los Angeles. I was going to move to SoCal, whether or not I had a job waiting for me there, and see how things played out.

Then, all my plans changed when I saw the AC1 OCR job listing on Turbine's web site. I quickly applied, and decided that I was willing to sacrifice my dream of living in Los Angeles in favor of a different dream -- working for Turbine on Asheron's Call.

So you can imagine how psyched I was when I was offered the chance to continue working my dream job, IN my dream location.

And, hopefully, you can understand why -- now that I've been living here for nine months -- I've chosen to remain in Los Angeles and bid farewell to Turbine and the Asheron's Call team.

As many of you have read in srand's post, I took over as Live Producer upon her recent departure. The plan was that I would manage the day-to-day operation of the team, while our Lead Designer would continue managing the creative vision of the game. My replacement would operate out of the Westwood studio, where he or she would have the benefit of working directly with Calandryll and the rest of our excellent OCR staff. It's been pretty difficult not answering y'all when you asked what job I was moving to, but we wanted to make it part of an official announcement along with srand's depature. We'd just about finalized the messaging when we got word of the team move.

So who's left? How many of those unlucky *ten* developers in Santa Monica are going to accept to relocate in Massachusetts to work on a dead game? And how Turbine expected to run a mmorpg with ten developers? Come on.

I leave the last comments to J., because I share his point of view and I couldn't have written it better:

Why did Turbine decide to set up shop in California in the first place? First time they announced it, it was for Jason Bell (at the time recently released from having to plug Horizons for Atari,) and then Jessica Mulligan was out there ... but why even have setups on both coasts?

Forcibly moving employees around and then moving them back is laying them off, or at least damn near. Company loyalty has to be stretched paper-thin at that point, and well, there are game jobs to be had in California. Way more than in Boston, in fact.

End then even more, the part I care about:

MMOG sequels are stupid. Turbine was stupid to make AC2, and they made it in stupid ways. They very admirably took ambitious contracts and moved to be a self-sufficient self-publisher. But you don't fuck with your fans, and you damn sure don't fuck with the employees that are worth keeping. Or this is what happens.

Maybe they'll get MEO and DDO out the door and maybe they won't fall flat on their faces, but maybe they will. Right now the latter crisis seems far more interesting to me than the former.

You know what I expect now? SOE buying the whole Turbine.