Today, Mythic Entertainment's VP Mark Jacobs issued a statement on the future of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning on the game's official website. He addressed the layoffs in the customer service department, the QA team and a significant portion of the playtest group, basically putting the layoffs in the context of the larger staff cuts for parent company Electronic Arts.

"Obviously, demand for a large QA and play-testing staff also falls after launch," said Jacobs. "As a result, we saw a staff reduction which is in line with the company-wide initiative. In no way does this conflict with our commitment to customer service. Staffing numbers will always map to consumer needs – it goes up when we launch new products and expand popular ones, and comes back down as players become familiar with the game."

"Although we now have fewer developers on the game than we did leading up to the launch, WAR still has a larger dev team today than we ever had for Dark Age of Camelot," he added.

Warhammer Online shipped 1.5 million units to retail in its first week and had over 750,000 active players soon after launch. However, that number has dipped to where EA has indicated that only 300,000 active subscribers remain.