what impact did the layoffs have?

[Zoetstofzoetje]

http://kotaku.com/5582531/layoffs-hit-civilization-v-creators

Firaxis laid off 20 to 30 people yesterday including folks from the quality assurance team, the user interface art team, animators, programmers and designers.

This happened early July.

I wonder, what impact did these layoffs have on the product? Several direct implications are:

- less manpower to get the product in on time at the desired development stage.
- lower effectiveness of the survivors (as established in various research settings)
- less product testing.

I think we could do with an animator less, but programmers? eugh! Seems to me that Sid is a better businessman than a studio operator. Most of us would have bought the game even if it had shipped on a disc wrapped in toilet paper. At Blizzard they seem to have a different development philosophy, which hasn't been unprofitable to them.

Considering the estimated profitability of this product this seems to be an odd move. Does anyone know what on earth was going on at Firaxis at the time?

[Louis XXIV]

I think they had a third project in the works (besides Civ5 and the facebook Civ), but it got canceled. I don't think it was the Civ5 dev team that got hurt (the fact that Jesse Smith was among the group tells you it was another project). Shame about Jesse Smith, though (I think he brought us C3C and he posted on various Civ boards, so he seemed like a cool guy).

EDIT: I will say that laying off Q&A is generally not a good sign. Now it's possible they felt that their fan testers were a suitable substitute (and maybe they were), but Q&A probably weren't testing any secret projects and could have devoted their resources to Civ5.