NCsoft Sees More Layoffs as Its MMO Support Goes to a New Company

NCsoft, publisher of Guild Wars and WildStar changed its customer support operations to a third-party provider and has left some of its employees high and dry.

Polygon reports that NCsoft has decided that it would rather take its customer support operations outside of the company instead of keeping the employees it currently has, creating many layoffs for the Korean publisher. Apparently, this is all part of NCsoft's plan to restructure its company. A spokesperson for the company said the following:

As the final phase of a restructuring process announced last October, NCsoft West is transitioning its first level customer support services to an external provider. This change will better enable the company to provide scalable customer support across new business segments and its current portfolio of popular games.

Unfortunately, as result of this migration, a small number of customer support positions have been impacted. Today's change should have no impact to former, current or future customers and is intended to enable NCsoft West to more easily scale its future support organization for new products on new platforms.

The decision to reduce staff is never an easy one, and NCsoft West will be working closely with those impacted and providing ongoing support. We sincerely wish everyone impacted well in their future endeavors.

While it's admirable that NCsoft will be continuing to support the 16 people that it has let go from its Austin, Texas office, it will be interesting to see if this third-party customer support operations provider will work out. Unfortunately, this isn't the first time we reported about a significant number of layoffs given to NCsoft's roster.

NCsoft West will continue working in its Austin, Texas office that's primarily dedicated to customer support and billing operations and hopefully won't have to layoff any more of its employees.