[Arno12]

This is a bummer to me and I hope it doesn't mean what everyone says it means, STO helped me through some tough times and introduced me to you Guys. But Petrarch is right, Cryptic is bare bones as it is so the writing is one the wall.

[JByb04]

Not to throw stones at Kael or anything.

But he really needs to put out something other than he's not being laid off yet. As a CM he should be alerting upper management and advising them to issue a statement.

But that would make sense, and we all know in the making sense department, he struggles. But his job could be on the line. If we stop spending because of bad PR. Embracer isn't going to hesitate to start headhunting.

[Petrarch]

Time for a bump. Taken from a post on Reddit, these are supposed to be the staff members affected by the layoffs known to date based on their LinkedIn profiles:

Patrick Poage: Senior Environment Artist @ Cryptic Studios

Barclay Chantel: Art Director at Cryptic Studios

Hector Marquez: Senior Character Artist

Bill Yeatts: Game Developer at Cryptic Studios

Ian Richards: Senior Environment, FX, & Ship artist

Joe (Wampole) Jing: Principal/Lead Character Artist at Cryptic Studios

Christopher Andry: Acting QA Lead for Star Trek Online at Cryptic Studios

Kiri Jolly: Staff Software Engineer at Cryptic Studios

Chris Crowley: QA Test Analyst

[JByb04]

I think that explains all of the ship cosmetic changes.

They were wanting to get them done before getting the axe.

This is a dark day in the history of STO.

[darthnovawave]

Sad day indeed for the Cryptic team in what has been a rough year not just for Embracer-owned studios but the industry at large. Hopefully these folks can land new opportunities soon.

I kind of wonder what this DECA Games move means though. Is Cryptic Studios being folded into DECA, or is it still going to be its own group and just rolling up to a new set of bosses? I've not played anything under the DECA Games label, but frankly what I've read online about them, it sounds like they basically do what Cryptic's been doing with STO, Neverwinter, and Champions for quite a while anyway. Hopefully the cries of "maintenance mode is here" dominating Reddit and other places are somewhat oversold here, but I guess time will tell.

[Jestersmith]

Radio Silence since layoffs no ten forward this week as a reassurance to fans and they just pop this up

[JByb04]

I'd be interested in seeing what the trends are showing in terms of in game spending.

Probably need something to boost confidence. Kael hasn't done a very good job at managing this situation.

Smart play would've been to do a stream for both Neverwinter / STO and address the layoffs and follow up with a status update of Cryptic as a whole. Get someone from upper management to come on and address the player base.

We're their customers! If we think the games are going into maintenance mode or are at risk of being shut down; Chances are, we're not going to invest our time, and money into them.

I'd usually be excited about the anniversary ship. But right now, I'm just hoping STO has an actual future, and Cryptic has done little to assure me that it does.

[Petrarch]

Personally I think they're getting ahead of themselves (and almost as if they're pretending nothing happened) but them, especially Kael, continuing to be tone deaf to what's going on with the community is nothing new.

They mentioned previously there was another ship launching this month and the winter ship got a mention too - maybe instead of teasing yet another ship (which I'm guessing will either be a Borg one or that pyramid thing from the last episode) that'll probably not get mentioned again for months, they should concentrate on the here and now situation to restore some community confidence?

[Generator]

They were specifically asked about the anniversary ship, the way I heard it. Folks wanted to know they had plans that far out.

[Bridger]

It does not look well.

[Sorotia]

This could be a good thing or a totally bad thing....one can hope with new development maybe will breath new life into the game. Perhaps we can see more than just event after event with a few new missions peppered in throughout the year

Done well, the Star Trek license can bring in people and money

[darthnovawave]

While Spencer and others might be reading this right, there are some potential counterarguments here. I don't claim to know who is right or wrong on any of this, but having seen a lot of changes from inside the corporate offices of a major company over the years, I've seen these kinds of breadcrumbs be misread.

First, Cryptic just went through layoffs, and like any company downsizing, one of the common targets is recruiters, since execs view people who upsize the headcount as dead weight when they want to shrink the headcount. Thus, instead of rehiring recruiters they might just be leveraging DECA's recruiters, who are using their own talent acquisition tools, which aren't integrated into Cryptics websites (which may or may not change in the future).

Second, DECA specializes in keeping up older games. They may have looked at Cryptic's teams and decided to upsize the teams. We know that most of the layoffs hit their new projects, not their existing cash cows, and the support teams are bare bones skeleton crews. Kael's job as the STO CM has been called out...but he's also the CM for Neverwinter and Champions and a writer for Champions. We've all made our cracks about typos and errors in STO blogs, so they might be trying to break up the workload back into separate jobs, and maybe upsizing some of these other teams, not replacing them with cheaper labor.

As far as the LinkedIn stuff, a lot of employees have flagged themselves as open to work, but they might just be testing the waters. Cryptic seems unlikely to launch new games anytime in the near future so career growth and prospects are probably a lot more limited now internally. With the lack of internal prospects, they might be looking elsewhere to keep climbing career ladders. Given all the layoffs in the gaming and broader tech fields in the past year or two, external mobility probably isn't all that likely right now either, so I doubt we see a mass exodus short term.

As for the whole Ten Forward exchange, clearly DECA is taking a more active hand, at least right now. DECA specializes in maintaining older games but Cryptic has been an active developer of new games that happened to be supported by some older successes until now. DECA may be helping to reorganize Cryptic towards the same kind of support model, so longer-term dev plans might be subject to change depending on the outcome of that reorganization work. Maybe they are going to be more involved for the long term, but they might just reorg Cryptic and then step back. Only time will tell on that one.

Again, this is all speculation and I could be wrong on all counts, but Spencer and other content creators seem to be spiraling around the doom and gloom hypothesis, which may or may not be the case given the nebulous evidence in question. Frankly, new content has been moving at a crawl already and can't get much worse, the games are profitable for a parent company that needs all the profits it can muster, so likely at worst we'll get more of the same, but at best we might actually see DECA drive a bit of badly needed new life into things beyond a couple missions and continuous stream of new microtransactions.

[JByb04]

One red flag above all stood out to me.

Al Rivera

He's been with the game since launch and if he's saying he's open for work. That's a bad bad bad sign. There's a reason you haven't seen me in game much as of late. I'm still waiting to see how all of this plays out and I don't feel much like investing a lot of my time and energy into a game that seemingly has little life left in it.

I almost wish VIACOM would just pull the license and find a new developer at this point. I might have to wait a few years for a new Star Trek MMO and start from scratch. But at least I wouldn't have to wonder if the game was going to get any active development or not.

They should've taken a page from Bioware and SWTOR's playbook on how to handle a hand off like this.