Gee, that's good news.  Not.

Best regards,
Steven. 

Well the normal development cycle at big game companies is like this.

Work hard, drive the people into the ground to create the game. Massive crunches, during the final days before everything that is critical is taken care of.

And as soon as the ratio of cost vs benefit comes in. There is the cycled axe.

And in this case it is said it's across a bunch of different departments. 

Though the quoted text...

Markus Wilding, global public relations director for 2K, tells Kotaku is was about 20 people.

"I can confirm that Firaxis has realigned its development resources in order to streamline its development process, reduce costs and maximize the overall performance the studio," Wilding told Kotaku. "This will result in the elimination of approximately 20 positions. These reductions will not impact Firaxis' ability to create and deliver AAA titles, including its forthcoming Sid Meier's Civilization V and Sid Meier's Civilization Network for Facebook."

Meaning, they did the job and weren't needed as they are no longer core to the needs of the bottom line. And we fired them. We don't need 10 quality assurance testers, so they get the axe. And the art department, the low guys on the totem pole were let go, and so on.

It's par for the course at those game development companies.

Now the consolation prize is, I've not heard of anything like that for Stardock. They seem to just transition those folks back over to other projects. And maybe they do lay off some extra testers, but I think they've utilized the beta testers efficiently as an external testing force, that in turn has made their games much better, and the relationship from Company to Customer is just outstanding.

That said, I do hope those who've been let go find a good home, that hopefully is more stable in the long run.

Flexible labour markets and capitalism at work. Yuk.

These companies get what they pay for.  Employees that know they're going to be canned after the project are not going to put much effort into things.  I think C&C4 is a pretty good example of quality suffering in this regard.  The managers can try to hide the layoffs of course, but if it keeps happening so consistantly it's not hard for the low ranking employees to know their fates after the bulk of the work is done.  Disposabel employees may be good for the bottom line, but I think it's one of the major reasons why many modern games just seem to lacking compared to older ones.  It the company doesn't care about their employees, the employess don't care about the quality of their work.

disagreed... the gaming business is like this.. they know that if they do a superb job and create an awesome game, it helps them get better and better jobs.  It's like football players trying to win the super bowl even though their contract might end @ the end of the season and they know they're getting transferred off the team or something similar.

Bigger companies tend to have far more significant turnover, for some reason.  It really makes no sense; perhaps you save on the bottom line by terminating the position in the meantime, but six to twelve months later you're hiring again, which is a huge gamble because you really don't know the kind of skill you're getting (especially for more junior positions). 

My dad's a business owner, and he sooner cuts back his own paycheck than layoff staff for economic reasons.  It may hurt in the meantime, but the bottom line is that it'll cost him more to hire and train new staff at a later point in time.

Right. I'm guessing you're too young to know what Tetris is.

Well, looks like I won't need to inquire about my resume I sent them...