Gamasutra is reporting 35 employees of Perpetual Entertainment have been laid off, calling this a cost-cutting move to support a delay to the release of Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising. The Perpetual Forums (thanks FiringSquad) confirm the departures, however, they characterize this as normal turnover resulting from the completion of content production roles on the upcoming MMORPG, though they do confirm the reported delay:

I am posting this message on behalf of Chris McKibbin, President & Co-founder of Perpetual:

As some of you may have heard we have made some staffing changes at Perpetual. We are proud to announce that we are within a month of being content complete on Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising , our upcoming AAA MMO title. As we achieve this major development milestone, a number of content production roles come to an end. The Gods & Heroes team remains over 80 talented people strong as we enter the final phase prior to launch -- play-testing and tuning to deliver the highest quality game possible. In addition, because we value the feedback our beta testers have been giving us, and because we want to ship the highest quality game possible, we have moved our target ship date from the spring to the summer of 2007. This extension of the testing and tuning phase of the project will allow us to focus entirely on making a great game – which is our #1 goal.

Perpetual remains 100% committed to shipping a fantastic Gods & Heroes game and to continuing development of the much-anticipated Star Trek Online .