Perpetual Entertainment has announced that they will be downsizing their Gods and Heroes development team by 30 to 40 people, citing the need for a less specialized team.  PE has also stated that they will support their employees in transitioning to new employment.  The game was originally scheduled for a Fall 2007 launch, which has now been pushed back to early in 2008 saying the game still needs more polish.  Dana Massey of WarCry spoke to PE Co-Founder Chris McKibbin about these developments.

For the last several weeks, Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising had been in Closed Beta testing. While it is, according to Perpetual, content complete, they felt it needed more polish before it goes to market. "Our feeling was driving hard to make a fall launch would lead to less than high quality results and we've seen that in other launches," he said. "We've made the decision to give the game more time. What we really want to do is to deliver a polished and high-quality game."

The moves were born out of their desire to switch focus to a less specialized development team that he believes will be able to act with more agility on the feedback of the player base. The current marketplace demands high-quality, huge MMOGs and to achieve that they required many specialists who performed very specific functions. That kind of set-up is not perfectly suited to MMOGs in this phase of development.

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