Further redundancies hit NCsoft

NCsoft has announced that it is to ‘scale back’ the Tabula Rasa team at its Austin studio, as it plans to cease service of the failed MMO next February.

The news comes mere days after former studio CEO Richard Garriott announced his departure from the company, and only a few months since it laid off a further 24 staff at the studio and disbanded its development team in Brighton, UK.

A statement posted on the game’s website said: "Last November we launched what we hoped would be a ground breaking sci-fi MMO. In many ways, we think we’ve achieved that goal. Tabula Rasa has some unique features that make it fun and very different from every other MMO out there.

"Unfortunately, the fact is that the game hasn’t performed as expected. The development team has worked hard to improve the game since launch, but the game never achieved the player population we hoped for. So it is with regret that we must announce that Tabula Rasa will end live service on February 28, 2009."

A spokesman for the firm told Kotaku: "We’re going to be scaling down the TR team in preparation for the end of live service. But for now, we currently don’t know how many people will be affected by that."