Well, we can’t say we didn’t see it coming but Tabula Rasa, Richard Garriott’s MMORPG, will be coming to an end in February of next year according to Edge Online . This news comes in just days after Garriott announced he will be quitting his job at NCSoft. Which he, incidentally, announced when he had arrived from his trip to the International Space Station — everything must seem insignificant when you’ve just come back from space.

The majority of Tabula Rasa’s team will be laid off as the date approaches. NCSoft has claimed that Tabula Rasa will be completely dismantled — there is absolutely no chance of the game coming back - the decision has been made. The game will be free for its last month, from January to February. Loyal players of Tabula Rasa (i.e. the people who didn’t cancel before today’s date) will be receiving some extra perks from NCSoft including two three month subscriptions to Lineage II and City of Heroes, among other things. Users who prepaid for subscriptions will get their money back, of course.

Back in August, the Tabula Rasa crew just missed getting the axe during that around of layoffs at NCSoft. Since then rumors of Tabula Rasa getting shut down have been rampant - whilst NCSoft negated all of them at every point. According to NCSoft it was a recent decision — at the time they were trying to keep the game up as long as possible.

RIP Tabula Rasa, 2007-2008.

In a disturbing trend, Vancouver developer Radical Entertainment will be laying off 100 employees — going down the same road as NCSoft and Midway. The decision comes from Radical Entertainment’s parent company, Activision-Blizzard. Activision-Blizzard cut Radical’s total staff down to half, and from four games down to two.
Read the full story

Despite their rejection of the claims that they were laying off employees, NCSoft has indeed layed off 21 employees from their Austin office according to Kotaku.

“We are announcing that 21 positions are being eliminated in the Austin office of NCsoft in the area of product development”

NCSoft further said that these cuts were mainly from projects which had yet to be announced, or those that were still in the prototype phase. Employees from the “Dungeon Runner” project were also layed off.

Yesterday NCSoft announced that they had a drop in both profit and revenue.

Austin developer, NCSoft, is following suit with Midway and laying off 150 of their employees. Fortunately, for some, the developers of Tabula Rasa have been given a second chance.

Read the full story