After learning of the unfortunate layoffs at Rock Band developer Harmonix, we followed up with MTV Games to find out a bit more. A spokesperson informed us that the restructuring had nothing to do with sales performance. In fact, The Beatles: Rock Band has now sold more than a million units across the globe.
"This was a process and business decision unrelated to the performance of any MTV Games / Harmonix product. MTV Games and Harmonix are very pleased with the sales of our Rock Band titles and we expect to continue to see strong sales throughout the holidays across all of our titles. The Beatles: Rock Band has sold over 1 million units worldwide to date. Again, the reason for the restructuring is due to better aligning our staffing to best suit our product development plans and schedules moving forward," a spokesperson stressed to us.
MTV added that the 39 affected employees represents about 13% of the Harmonix workforce. Part of the plan is for Harmonix to make "a structural and strategic change in how it handles QA." The spokesperson continued, "Harmonix staffed up its QA department and support positions based on the 2009 worldwide release schedule. At this time, Harmonix will shift to a combination of temporary/part time help, outsourcing and support from external partners (which is in line with how other game developers manage their QA departments.)"
Recently, Harmonix announced that the Rock Band platform had surpassed 1,000 songs and more than 60 million songs had been downloaded to date. And from a business perspective, parent company Viacom said about a month ago that the economics of the Rock Band business were improving.
1 Comments
December 10, 2009
Wow. It took that long to pass 1 million WORLDWIDE and ACROSS ALL PLATFORMS? Those are actually pretty terrible numbers. I'm sure they were expecting much more.