NCsoft West has laid off a number of support staff and is moving its customer service operation to a third-party provider, according to Polygon. Today’s layoffs are apparently the final phase of a corporate restructuring announced in October of 2014.
Sixteen staffers at NCsoft’s Austin location were let go, which was basically that office’s entire support team, according to an anonymous tipster who was among the affected.
The official statement from the company is below.
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.
NCsoft West is the NCsoft division responsible chiefly for Aion and Lineage II in the regions outside of South Korea, including North America and Europe. We do not yet know whether NCsoft’s broader stable of games (Guild Wars 2, WildStar) are affected by this move. We welcome more information from those impacted and extend our sympathies to the support staff let go.
[Source: Polygon via GamePolitics. Updated 4/9/15 10:30 p.m. EDT.]
