f13.net

Posted this in the Agency thread, but it's looking like it may need its own thread:

In an odd rumor, apparently George Broussard of all people has been posting on twitter that SOE has massive layoffs planned for today including the closing of the Seattle studio making the Agency, and possibly the Denver studio (http://twitter.com/georgeb3dr).





Also, from a poster over in the GAF thread: (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=425932)

Well, it's April 1st tomorrow so the timing would be rather... precious.

April 1 is also the beginning of another fiscal quarter, (and new year for some companies) so the timing would be rather appropriate, really.

I wonder if it has anything to do with a reorg of Sony in general.  I deleted the e-mail but got a notice a few weeks back my PS3 Live ToS was changing company acronyms.

The closings would be happening today I think (the twitter post was made on the 30th). The Agency has obviously had some development issues. The Denver studio apparently just makes a bunch of online Trading Card games. Not really a shock to see that shut down.  Really the only thing about this that is surprising to menus that SOE has that many studios in the first place.

I get the sense that this was a long time coming for SOE.

So much for a Planetside announcement.  :why_so_serious:

From Kotaku (yeah, yeah...)


http://kotaku.com/#!5787461/sonys-mmo-makers-close-three-studios-lay-off-one+third-of-workforce

Normal spring cleaning?

Ok so what did they have up and coming game wise?  Agency...Planetside 2....???

Did they have anything to do with Duke Nukem Forever?

PC Gamer claims to have contacted SOE directly (http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/03/31/soe-closes-three-studios-lays-off-205-employees-cancels-the-agency-live-games-unaffected/)

- The Agency canceled
- The employees at the 3 closed studios that weren't let go are off to San Diego to work on Planetside and some EQ thing
- Supposedly live games unaffected

Gamasutra has an article up now with more details. (http://gamasutra.com/view/news/33836/SOE_Hit_With_205_Layoffs_Three_Studio_Closures_Agency_Cancelled.php)

Well of course the closures won't affect existing products. It's not like everything except DCUO, EQ, EQ2, and Free Realms are running under more than a skeleton crew. I wouldn't be shocked to see DCUO go into maintenance mode before too long.

1/3 their workforce?  Has that been verified?

that's not tweaking, that's the start of SOE retrenching

I tired paying my bills with Appropriate Concern once. Turned out they just wanted money.  :uhrr:

I hope the people let go hit the ground running.

Honestly, is anyone surprised at any of this other than it took THIS LONG for it to happen? I like EQ2 a lot but realistically what are they selling anymore that people are buying? DCUO did alright but I can't imagine people stuck around after the bugs vomited everywhere. They billed Free Realms as the Great Hope when it came out only to completely change it around. I know precisely Zero people who ever even glanced at that F2P Star Wars game.

Shit, I'm surprised that Sony's taken this long, given that they're big fish who probably have a somewhat low tolerance for shit performance, much less shit performance ever since WoW hit.

Like I said, my surprise is mostly that they had that many studios to close down.  Sucks for the 200+ people losing their jobs, but it is slightly amusing to go back and read the first page of the Agency thread where Schild proclaims it to be the future of MMO's.

Mass layoffs and cancellation? Yeah, I'd say that's actually a pretty accurate future for MMOG's.  :why_so_serious:

That sucks since the Agency was at least trying something different.

Free Realms they've let stagnate and they missed a huge opportunity with Clone Wars.  This doesn't really surprise me given their best properties are now years old.

Does anyone think that the state of the Japanese economy has anything to do with this?
Also, isnt it a GOOD thing they're gonna concentrate on Planetside2?

No, I don't think it has anything to do with the Japanese economy.  I think it has a lot to do with SOE has put out little more than shit for years.  When it gets something promising it bungles it, and it backs losing horses.  DC Universe has more to do with their current state than the economy of Japan.

Presumably they would already be investing in Planetside 2 with the resources it needs.  Adding anyone else would give marginal returns.  Maybe they feel there is more to be gained than just letting some people go or keeping them working on failed projects, but if it makes that big a difference then why weren't they supporting it at those levels to begin with?

But GOOD?  No.  I'd like to see a diverse set of games released.  Now we've got in the works another fantasy game and a sequel to a game they never properly supported, and then went the wrong direction in payment model on.  I have little faith in them learning.  Doom and Gloom and whatnot.

Rumour was that DCUO was pushed out the door because SOE desperately needed money flowing back into the studio and a hit.

I wonder how tenable Smedley's position is (or if he's even still there). He's made a lot of public statements about titles that have missed the mark entirely while leading SOE down an increasingly worsening business path.

My thoughts exactly. He's overdue.

Well people like Smedley don't get fired.   They get let go with multimillion dollar bonuses :uhrr:.

Yawp. I'm hoping to get a good 6-12 months out of PSNext, and that's being optimistic. I can see it going a lot worse.

It would be amazing to know just how much money the agency sucked up. It's been in development for so long that killing it is probably a merciful act.

Other than that SOE has been a spent force for quite a while. The idea they had 600 developers and so few titles making decent money makes it impressive they held on this long.

It's been obvious for years that The Agency was never going to come out.

SOE's E3 booth for the past couple years has been a disaster, filled with extremely outdated looking games that garnered no interest from anybody. They need a serious rethink of their overall strategy.

So what's on their slate? EQ3, though I haven't heard ANYTHING since that initial blurb, and Planetside 2 and...?

I still look forward to the possibility of EQ3, though they will have to radically change how the series plays for it to be successful. 

My 5 year old plays it every once in a while - he has a predictably short attention span so when I do let him play on the PC he bounces between Minecraft, Just Cause 2 (just wants to drive stuff off cliffs) & Clone Wars Adventures.

Unfortunately without subbing you end up owning everything you can buy very quickly but the shiney is really the only thing you get when you sub (and they just keep adding more shiney to keep you grinding) gameplay wise you dont get significantly more content than F2P

If they want some credibility back(and I use that term loosely) they need to make 1 decent MMO rather then focusing on multiple that all turn out to be mediocre at best.  Do I think that will happen...no...not with whats his name in charge.

I didn't even realise their F2P game had been released. Fantastic marketing there...

It's targeted at kids who watch Clone Wars.  Really young kids who can handle mini-games for a little while before they get bored of it.  There's no obvious long-term plan for it.

Free Realms launched on the PS3 this week, apparently. SOE's marketing is absolutely awful.

Not sure if hotlinking from Wordpress works, but anyway... something SOE-related I found on the weekend that made me laugh.

(http://unsubject.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/qyality.jpg?w=575&h=233)

Whoever finds that probably gets the job

.. oh my god.

You really can't make stuff like this up.

No offense to him, but I don't think Schild is the best person to get advice from concerning what makes an MMO work.  Didn't he say that swg's nge was the future of MMO's too?  That worked out about as well for soe as The Agency did.

Point of order: NGE got released. We'll never know with The Agency.

And like it or not (as in, opinions aside), pretty sure I work for the company solely responsible for the future of online gaming.

You work for Blizzard?

Honestly that is the only place he could be talking about. Anywhere else and he's more delusional than anyone thought. I'm happy to be proved wrong but I doubt it'll happen.

Zynga.

He's also correct.

When did Blizzard buy Zynga!  :ye_gods:

While I may be nitpicking over semantics, I'm not even sure what being "solely" responsible for the future of anything would even mean, short of some sort of bizarre Orwellian nightmare where no other company but Zynga ever releases an online game until the end of time.  But "very important now and likely in coming years," sure.

Shit son, that is rough. That's like saying, "I work at the company that is the future of search and advertising!" And everyone says, "google???" "Nah, yahoo."

If Zynga is the future of online gaming, they'll be doing it without me.  Fuck Farmville and all those shitty Facebook games that are made for old people, tweens, hipsters and soccer moms.

All of whom outnumber anti-social geeks in numbers.

Hmm.    :why_so_serious:

+1

Since I was just about to type that exact thing.

Is anyone excited about the games they've decided to focus on?

- a new property in the Everquest franchise. I'm a little dour after seeing how money-grabbing the cash shopification of Eq2 turned out to be. Not that I'm against Eq2, it's a great game but I am reluctant to try a new and different game that may feel like you have to swipe your credit card every time you kill a mob.

- a new property in the Planetside franchise. I thought this game (which I haven't played) was considered evidence that FPS games work better if not part of a MMO architecture. And the first one bombed. So they're making a second one. Even if all the ex-players come back surely there's simply not enough of them to make this a success? Unless they all come back, and all stay subbed and all bring in friends.

I wouldn't say I'm excited, but I'm interested in EQ3.  Intuition tells me that being interested as far as I'll get.  For the past 10 years, SOE has been steadily moving away from what I find enjoyable in gaming. 

Bombed is a bit of a stretch. It was great up until they started tinkering with stuff and then the stupid expac caves. That was the start of it, and the Bending was the breaking point. Yeah, I am excited having been there but I am also a bit apprehensive about it. Ask BW...

If they're smart it'll be F2P with purchasable items, skins, leader boards and other social stuff.  If they're not they'll try the whole Subscription FPS game thing again.

I'm betting on the latter.

Blizzard is only responsible for one online game every decade or so and the only fallout is people try to compete with them. Poorly.

Everyone and their dog tries to compete with Zynga. Even companies that have nothing to do with gaming.

You laugh now, but we all know who'll be shitting in a sock when Diablo III comes out.

I wear sandals now.

Well yea, but what has that got to do with the price of tea in China?

Will rise sharply as thousands of Chinese find new employment at workstations operating 24/7.

Zynga makes games?

Apparently, yes.  My mother plays all those facebook games.  Actually she stopped playing Zynga games because all the popups drove her insane.  She called them 'too needy.'

What do games have to do with the future of online gaming?

From what I can tell, they made a game but just put a new coat of paint on it every now and then.   And copied Mob Wars.  Or Mafia Wars.  One of the two.

And autospam your friends in facebook.

I can't for the life of me understand why SOE decided to shitball everything else including the Agency in favor of Planetside Next. The franchise is not what you'd call a success.

I tend to agree; however, from a veteran standpoint, this game had the best involvement and history than any game I have played. Anyone who played PS from the onset had those "holy fuck yeah!" moments which they tend to center on, myself included... Perhaps SOE just fed off the fan mantra of "Planetside was ahead of its time" and took it a little too close to heart. I am all for the sequel considering my past affinity with PS, but I fully understand people being flabbergasted by the move.

The whole Zynga thing is going back to the future. Back in the elder days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, there were two classes of game companies. Mainstream companies like Parker Brothers that made games for the masses. Then there were little specialty companies like TSR that made far more sophisticated games for a smaller more geeky group.

Zynga is not going to replace Blizzard as TSR, nor is it going to replace Trion as Chaosium. It's simply creating a mainstream Parker Brothers to their smaller geeky entries.

Sometime projects take on a life of their own as they spiral down into the toilet bowl of disaster. 

This comment had me snorting up some soda.   I have no doubt Zynga and their ilk will create a huge (beyond what it is already) industry.   That industry really has nothing to do with what we call online gaming though.

Plantside was one of the best experiences in MMOs for many people. Those coming out of the woodwork when the sequel was announced reinforces this. It also has a built in audience, and is 100% SOE owned.

If they can capture the glory of the original, but with modern resources and work out some of the old games issues. It will be money hats.


The agency did not really test or play well, with any one.

Why do you think this?  It's essentially a large scale FPS and most FPS enthusiasts can play other, prettier titles to their heart's content without incurring a sub fee. 

You assume it will have a sub fee.

Assuming a sub fee, I have yet to find any FPS game, console or PC, on the same scale and scope as Planetside had. I enjoyed the hell outta BF2142 as well and caught some good moments, but it pales in comparison. To each their own though...

hell, we are all assuming PS:2 is actually going to be released as well.

It's never coming out.

I hope you are wrong.

I have yet to find any FPS game worth a sub fee.

Successful?  I could accept that for the niche that PS 2 will attract.  BW said "money hats".  When I see "money hats", my pea-sized brain thinks 1 million + subs.  I just don't see PS 2 doing that.  

Eh, semantics. Yes successful and profitable. FPS, or rather competitive shooters in the MMO space still have an uphill battle in the RPG combat dominated world.

Unrelated to above conversation.

What do you think will happen, though?

If they can get good reviews and word of mouth. Otherwise I see an APB.

I am perhaps to much of an optimist to answer. However I do know that the game is mostly done, the GUI is done (Baring any tweeks needed, this was confirmed by a SOE GUI artiest/programer), and assets are being added. With the switch of engine, it will take time to convert all of that. Unless SOE is in dire straights financially, I believe it will be finished. Its an original IP ( No money loss ), its the second attempt, and it can be sustainable as a boutique game, using all in house tech and resources and pipelines, and sans initial design phase I believe they can keep overhead down. Its also being handled by members of the original pre-launch team.

I believe it is unlike the EQ to EQ2 sequel as EQ2 was way more than just a modernization, it was a completely different game, tech, and pipeline.

"the game is mostly done" + "we're switching engines" means "we're essentially starting over, but with most of our planning and art design out of the way already"

One does not simply hit "import" in their new engine and see their old engine's file formats listed.

While I wouldn't bet on it never being released, the fear is that any management team willing to throw out half their work when the game is "done" just to add some new tech widget in a different engine.. is a management team willing to fall into the trap of repeatedly doing this until you become an internet meme, then trollishly released by a competitor after your studio fails.

Switching engines was my words.

I don't know why people keep saying fps+mmo=success.  It hasn't so far and most people are content to get their online fps fix with the multiplayer side of games like COD, Battlefield, MOH, Halo and the rest.  And unless you play on XBox Live, you can do it without a monthly sub fee.  Until that changes, any fps MMO (unless its absolutely spectacular) will be, at best, niche.

I don't believe most hardcore fans of Plantside care about the masses. Niche is fine.  If you are thinking ANY FPSMMO will be the next Wow, it won't be, and you are crazy. There is an inherent wall built right in.

It will likely fare better this time with the lack of a sub fee. Also, i would like to remind everyone what games dropped months after Planetside launched.

(http://longgame.org/wp-content/uploads/timeline-of-planetside-cravings.gif)

The only large scale FPS on the market is Planetside.  No other FPS on today's market mix the scale and the number of different roles that can be played.  No one has even taken all the game play possible in PS and made it work for a 32 server.  No body has take a basic shooter and made it work for 100s on a side.  PS still does two things nobody else is doing.  People will pay for that.

No, it won't, because SOE is doing it. And they've amply demonstrated over the years that EQ1 was a perfect storm of converging factors, because everything else they've done has been deeply flawed even when it's been enjoyable.

It would have nothing to do with hardcore online gaming if hardcore online gaming companies weren't futzing around with Facebook trying to grab a piece of the pie. The only major dev that hasn't tried to jump in is Blizzard, but I'm sure Activision, somewhere, has plans. I wouldn't be shocked to see some weird Blizzard app as well (and it'd probably do well).

Point being, resources and time are being lost by hardcore gaming companies trying to compete in the mainstream facebook gaming market.

Ergo, it has everything to do with online gaming.

Edit: I'm not trying to toot my own horn here, this is just the current nature and trajectory of the market.

RealID.  Blizzard did try to capitalize on the social media craze, they just wanted it to be all internal.

Planetside though... how many servers are there?  Y'all are talking about battles of 100's of players, but how many are actually playing right now?  Even during the Reserves program I don't remember seeing hundreds of people on one battlefield.  Maybe dozens.

Too bad heading that direction is shitty and derivative.

I quit playing the Rift demo when I was already bored and noticed the "Tweet" buttons.  :facepalm:

WoW also has a facebook Armory thing (http://apps.facebook.com/wow-armory/) that can spam your friends with achievements and shit.

I came back on the wave of "OMG beta slot", but I found at least one major battle on a pop-locked continent. But still you are talking bout it in its current form.

Yes.  I am talking about the game in its current form which is run by the people who will put out the sequel instead of the game people remember nostalgically.  Which one do you really think Planetside 2 is going to more closely resemble?

Its not that simple, stagnation was directly tied to the original engine. Something they are attempting to address with the modernization.  I believe if it sees the light of day, it will be like Planetside one, but  more extensible. A MAJOR complaint of the original, from both players and developers alike.

While it is true that the immediate future has switched from "wow killer" to "farmville killer" I think the extremely rapid dev cycles of Facebook gaming will keep it from having much of a long term impact on the big publishers behavior or resources.

Big Game Company X can turn out a few flash games of that type in a year, but they'll also see how many of those flash games scrape for 3 digits of player count and don't sell a single token and it will be much easier for them to wipe those games back off the books and return to what they "know".  Zynga seems like their business model is all Facebook gaming and the shotgun method so a couple completely profitless titles doesn't make the kind of waves it might for a company just dipping their toes into the water.

You mean the new engine they just switched out was going to solve those MAJOR complaints?  The engine which was apparently worth delaying a year for because they were otherwise finished?

So now the new-new engine is going to solve the complaints now?  Uh huh.  Not going to hold my breath.

Generally in house engines share the same components across titles. See Turbine/Funcom. As to your question, The old engine was unable to be updated in any meaningful way ( Thats one reason all new items added, with exception of BFR, used textures from other items, as an example. Engine was 100% front load, and packed, streaming was removed in alpha. ), it just was not built with expansions in mind. Yes, the new engine ( or even modernized engine) would alleviate this. Version 1.0 or 2.0 is still better than the original.

It was just one of many issues surrounding the original title, but stifled correction of anything else, especially stagnation of content, or even changing the maps.

There are also some apparently really nasty to fix bugs/hacks that were possible in the old game engine such as flying maxes that really need to get ironed out.

When they did their 30 day account reactivation thing for free a while back almost my whole guild went back to it for a while. Fights were pop locking and it was some old school massive warfare. Really going from some 32 person server to seeing a planetside continent fight in full swing shows how very good planetside did. Nothing today matches the size of the conflicts and diversity of units you could bring to a fight that planetside did. If they can move from a subscription based thing to something like a league of legends type micropayment system I think planetside could do very well again.

I will never forget the day I had seen a prowler fly.

They are designing it to run on the Phantom, obviously.

Hey! The Phantom would have made a BEAUTIFUL center piece!

I always felt that Planetside was just Tribes2 with persistence between matches.

PS was a pretty shitty fps, lets get that out there on the table right now. Forced inaccuracy all over the place. If it actually was Tribes 2 on a massive scale people would have actually cared about it.

Ok, they have Hexen, Duke 3d, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein on there but they left out Quake?

I say all of the below with love. I loved PS. I loved my Reaver. Warts and all, it ranks in my top 5 experiences on line, especially when I was running with KAOSS.

But the major issues then still exist today.


Something doesn't become successful because it's easier to update. It's either successful enough to update or it's not. Yes you hope the dev team can be replaced by a live team. But a wonderfully successful but hard to manage product keeps the dev team and the live team if that's what it takes. They used the "it's hard" excuse to launch EQ2 as well. And what are they on now, the 47th expansion for EQ1?

In-house engines built by the company can/do share assets and pipelines. But recall how much of SOEs catalog was acquisition.

PS1 was not unsuccessful because the world geometry was too hard to manipulate. I still blame the amount of the subcription fee. Calling PS1 the subs-fee equivalent of EQ1, especially back then, was the very essence of niave or hubris or both. It's not a world with a long progression of time sinks designed to keep you rolling along on content rails. It was just a game you played until you got bored and moved on to the subsequent succession of FPS games that didn't have fees. And adding this to the All Access Pass was another crazy assumption that people playing fantasy MMORPGs would leap to an FPS.

Business killed it, not tech.

They had a lot of really awesome ideas unfortunately killed by lack of success. Happens often. Even in this genre. I'm still waiting for certain no-duh things from CoH to become core to MMOs.


Very little has changed since 2003. The market is basically the same. Few missed the offering that PS1 had then, and nobody is clamoring for it now. It's actually surprising to me. FPS games have largely not changed at all except adding XP meters and more recently some MTX crap. Still can't always expect even vehicles, much less very large assaults like PS had. That tells me nobody cares enough about it as a selling point to provide major funding into.

Maybe if this was Bungie with a bottomless pit of MS cash launching Halo MMO right after Halo 3 and it was multiplatform, then we could see if the game mechanic has wide spread appeal. But PS is no more widespread a brand as this large scale combat mechanic has widespread demand.

I want to be wrong.

Just make it FTP and it will do fine.

Darniaq, I have written quite a lot about PS in the past, I don't really want to cover the list every time I comment, telling me the sub fee was a wall to acceptance is not telling me anything I don't already know, or have not talked about. HOWEVER, the main thrust of PS2 is to correct many of those flaws, and modernize the engine to that updating is even POSSIBLE.

I don't really have the inclination to write over and over again the long talks we have already had on the subject. Evey one keeps chanting about the sub fee, when it was already a given in any conversation. Please see the PS thread for my thoughts on the various issues surrounding PS one. I will say, that the sub fee was the method of the time, and planetside was still the only one of its type. Clearly they played with the idea of some F2P model with he fodder system, but hacking ( because of the engine and tech ) Shut that down rather quick, even though the fodder program was successful in filling the ranks. With SOE's current thrust, I have zero thoughts that PS2 will have a sub fee, unless its an optional tier. I just hope the F2p portion will not be jacked up, its distasteful.

The current conversation was about the underlying engine.

I'm high skeptical of everything that Smedley says about SOE's titles. The Agency was going to be released on multiple occasions, but never even got to public testing afaik. Planetside Next was due out Q1 / Q2 this year. SOE is really stuck in a position of spinning its wheels in the mud while desperately trying to appear that it really does have a plan.

I mean, how does the SOE President go from, "We're releasing this game in two months or so," to "We realised we had to completely upgrade the engine! Whoopsy!"?

(http://i.imgur.com/D2t8o.jpg)

 :awesome_for_real:  I would also take any term he uses with a grain of salt, I am quite sure some of the developers cringe every time he uses the wrong term.


I can answer that! Hes the President, not part of the Client/Tech team :) I bet T-ray is scolding him now for the terms he has been using :p

For being the president, it's obvious he's not very hands on with the small amount of products he's supposed to be worrying about. It's a shock he hasn't already been fired.

I was simply arguing semantics because I felt for once that it was proper.   Two entirely different markets exist here and in no way can I imagine social gaming to somehow gobble up or drastically alter online gaming.   Not saying it's impossible but it's at least improbable enough to give the two markets different names at this point.

There are already two different names, 'social media' and fucking videogames.

One eyes the other with unabashed envy in terms of its popularity. Guess which one.

Also, 'social media' is the distribution platform, not the entirety of the product. Social media games are a subset of the entire video games market, along side PC client-based titles, PC browser-based titles and console games (and others, but you get the idea). Give it some time and those social media games are going to increase in complexity while still remaining cheaper to develop than AAA titles and being easier to get into since it doesn't cost $50 up front (please don't bother going into how much it can cost all up - I know).

The differences aren't as great as some people believe (or would like there to be).

Let's also not forget that the insanely cheap cost of development for those social media type games can help a little studio fund bigger "real videogame" projects, much like mobile game development can.

Those same things that are good about social media and mobile games from developers' perspectives is also one of their biggest drawbacks.  The fact that just about anybody can develop these games cheap means that every single day there's tons of shit getting released and all those games compete for attention.  Sure a lot of developers get hard-ons thinking about their game being the next Farmville or Angry Birds, but that's not anymore likely than being the next WoW, CoD, or Minecraft.  They're also out less money if their game fails, but eventually they need to release something that makes money.

Obviously from all the layoffs and studio closings we see, there's a lot of risk involved in the PC and console markets, but there is something to be said for an industry that's been around for decades with a shitload of data to look to in how to successfully develop and market a game.

True, but the AAA video game industry isn't a healthy one. It relies heavily on a large pool of wannabe developers who are willing to work ridiculous hours and game budgets that are sustained by the few mega-hits the industry produces. There are a hell of a lot of flops.

I think the AAA games industry is due for (if not a crash) then a severe correction as too many titles with too large budgets crash and burn - EA vs Activision in a lawsuit of West / Zampella probably isn't going to help either. Probably the same for the social media games, but there it will be that there are too many devs out there to sustain all the titles that keep popping out.

I saw a lot of resumes from people who quit AAA gaming to try their hand at iPhone / Facebook games then decided to find a traditional job a year later when they realized making money in that space was just as hard with the added benefit of working on mostly shit products you would never play yourself.

If those games increase in complexity then a lot of the people playing them will simply stop playing them.   By the same token I don't see how MMO's can hope to cash in by doing the reverse.

Also there's no reason why AAA games can't be Fremium.

Yeah, I can totally see a freemium game recouping a 50M production cost.

I think you underestimate the amount people will pay per month for social games.  Zynga was estimated at up to $850mil in revenues last year.  The most conservative I saw was in early May 2010 predicting they were doing 50mil per month.

As I said before, there's a shitload more housewives, social people and bored teens who aren't into traditional games than there are gamers.   The problem (as pointed out) is getting them to bite into your particular apple.  I used to think Darniaq was a fool for coming here and preaching about the money being made by these "not really a game" games like Club Penguin, IMVUE and the like (and he did it loads better.) but I've realized since then he was very right.

Zynga's billion dollars a year is about as good a reason for your AAA freemium title to be successful as is WoW's billion dollars a year being a reason for every other AAA tradional MMO flop to have been successful.

And if they had an inkling of business sense they would have run it similar to Club Penguins (which Merusk mentions above), which Im fairly certain the parents of my 7 year old niece sunk 2 or 3 hundred into buying her cards or whatever.

I really don't see how this matters?   They could be making way more than that and they'd still have no chance of somehow making a video game that appeals to the social gaming crowd. 

On the whole the people trying to mix these two industries are mostly just going to waste a whole lot of money.   When the dust settles we might have a few large companies who make both types of products but there will still be a clear distinction between social games and video games even then.

And now comes the fight on "what is or isn't a video game"...   :why_so_serious:

I've got no horse in this race.  Fine, you don't want to consider social games, phone games, or anything that doesn't involve sitting on your ass with a controller or mouse manically button-pressing as video games because it somehow hurts your feelings or whatever reason "REAL" gamers use, great.   Once upon a time guys who played with minis and cardboard chits thought nobody would ever pay serious money for a silly animation where a big yellow dot ate smaller yellow dots and it, too, would pass.

More like how interested I should be in facebook games versus how interested I really am.

As a tester, I've worked on big titles, and little ones and spent 6 months working on casual games. It's all just work to me, whether I'm blasting aliens or baking pies. (Or baking alien pies!) but when I come home, I play the games I like. To make a point, I've played all kinds of shit that I'd probably not usually be interested in.

Who gives a fuck what Zynga makes? Their target audience is not (for example) Mass Effect or Crysis fans. And vice versa. The audiences have different expectations both in product and how it's priced.

As I said from before.   This is properly for ONCE a semantics argument.   It's not some butthurt thing though.   It's just a plain downright foolishness to say that the stuff WE play is ever going to be played by the people who want to play farmville.  Call them whatever you want but a super majority of those customers will never play the same thing.   

I think Zynga and the like are going to run into this problem pretty soon.

http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2011/03/social-medias-massive-failure.html (http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2011/03/social-medias-massive-failure.html)

They are currently making a bunch of money from advertisers because the advertisers haven't quite figured out that they aren't going to make any money from social media related marketing blasts. Once they catch on they'll tighten up the budgets.

Advertising runs on trends, with social media being a popular recent one. How does it generate revenue? We don't know! Just keep investing through! Everyone else is!

As someone who has spent a lot of time on video game-related forums, I always find it funny that large companies think having a conversation with their customers would be a good idea.

I'm not saying that social media game players are going to evolve into Starcraft pros, but that what can be offered through social media will at least hit the point where what can be offered through that platform will approach the casual game play seen in throwback titles. Something like Diablo 2, offered through RealID and Facebook? It could easily grab the casual player and the hardcore.

What Facebook has done is make a lot of games easier to find / share and its evolved fairly quickly. It has its negatives, but it has reached a lot of gamers who weren't the gaming stereotype.

Isn't part of the point of most Facebooks games though is that it only takes a few minutes at a time to play them?  In other words, people log on to Facebook to check a couple things, or make some updates, and then buy a couple things in Farmville or whatever and then log off.  That style of play doesn't really lend itself too well to something like Diablo 2.  I could be wrong.  I've never really looked to see if there are statistics on the average play session length of Facebook gamers, but it seems to me that this would be the stumbling block of more traditional games rather than complexity.  You have to make games where players can feel like they can accomplish something in just a few minutes.

The guys that made ProgressQuest should make a facebook add-on.  They'd be rich. 

As someone who works in the advertising industry who does encourage companies to have conversations with their customers, I DO think it's a good idea. It's just that 99% of companies out there aren't really prepared for an actual conversation with their customers. They are amazed and dismissive of the negative comments, and surprised when people don't actually respond in the manner the company's message should lead them. It's almost as if they don't really believe their customers are real people with real opinions.  :why_so_serious:

Seriously, there IS money to be made in social media, but it ain't easy, it requires commitment and time. It also requires actually listening and engaging your customer base as individuals instead of just walking wallets. Most companies treat their customers like the customers are mobs in an MMOG.

Derp. Dumb comment.

The whole idea of fremium games is that they make more money per user if done right. Sure, there's no lower bound on how much someone pays to play them but there's no upper bound either. Most games with $50 million budgets don't make back their cost today anyway.

As far as "social games" go, a lot of them are the kind of games you can play at work. That doesn't really lend itself to certain types of games. Personally I hate the term "social games" because it's conflating a game style with a style of play with a delivery platform. If we are talking specifically about Mafia Wars / FarmVille games I don't see a huge crossover with traditional games because those games have more in common with slot machines than "hardcore" games. And I've never seen anyone claim that maybe the little old ladies at the casino will play enough video slots to become Halo converts.

Grandma shoots a mean battle rifle!

I think you're right, but it's not the time investment. It's the complextiy. Diabo 2 takes more investment in mastery than Farmville.

Yes, I know that's what you meant. But I thought then that you were missing the point. Forget the subs fee. The real issue here is that no matter how good the engine is, there still isn't a market for a PS-style MMOFPS. There wasn't one eight year ago, and after Huxley and Global Agenda, market conditions might be even worse.

I'm glad they're trying. And I'll be first online to whatever open beta they run. But they're entering a market that has already been leaching the important bits of MMOs (persistent character, ongoing rewards, scaffolded challenges) and ditching the rest as non-critical.

I agree on both counts. MMO's won't launch on FB because playing a game on FB is a totally different mental exercise. *villes, *wars, these are modern Solitaire, something you got for free because you were already in the environment, requires slot machine persistence and no more mental capacity than is needed to pay half attention to that damned recurring conference call.

But there's actually plenty of overlap between a Cityville player and a Rift player. Similar motivators, different occasions. That is the crux of the  DA2/DA:O FB games: Good lightweight marketing/affinity experiences that are rewarding for playing in a transmedia narrative. I'm not really convinced people want this level of pervasive brand immersion all the time. But I'm sure as heck loading up DA2 on FB if there's a rewards in DA2 for PC, rather than playing *ville which is a one and done closed feedback loop.

Another branch of this seems to be the re-emergence of the old style arcade. But instead of putting quarters up to be the next player in, you can play as often as you're willing to pony up at all. Play for five minutes for free or five hours for cost.

These are also relatively inexpensive experiments vs the price of on air advertising, and compel attention in ways consumption-only TV ads can't. That may change with the rise of event checkins or AR/overlay.

Regardless, I feel SOE might be missing an opportunity here. Instead of carving up their playerbase even more, they should be looking at new ways to be in a persistent world on their infrastructure but not slaved to the old development/publishing models.

You could convince them to build houses and bake bread on Trammel though.  If it were in a browser.

No you can't. The people playing *ville don't want to have to manage their inventory screens and gold supplies, or run around a crowded city to find the ovens, or deal with trading their bread on the auction house. They want some simple, non-challenging button masher activities that they can do in 5 minutes while checking 170 different peoples' facespaces. The crafting in these games is at odds with traditional MMO crafting where the players want to manipulate the economy. If you try and stick one in the other, then someone is going to wind up pissed off.

I have some sympathy with the businesses concerned. Plenty of people don't behave like real people when they are on the internet, or not like people who should be let loose around other human beings. So if you start off from an attitude of treating your customers like human beings - which probably implies you expect them to behave like human beings - you are indeed going to be amazed at their response.

I'm talking about things like dramatically exaggerating problems they have experienced and repeating their story to anyone who will listen, refusing to believe that an honest mistake is possible and developing elaborate conspiracy theories instead, launching public hate campaigns against businesses or individual employees, being genuinely surprised and upset at the concept that they will be asked to pay for goods and services they desire and other behaviour that you would rarely see in a shop, office meeting or anywhere that people gather in real life.

I'm not disagreeing with your suggestion that businesses need to talk with their customers online.  You're right, but it's understandable if they find it hard and sometimes unpleasant.

These are the same groups who play The Sims.  Let them bake it, and they will come.

Worked for Sims Onl-

OH WAIT

Yes, because that same audience shows a marked preference for sub fee games.

You just said that Sims players were the same group as Ville players and that they would play UO as well.

I forgot when they hardcoded the payment option for UO into the server software.  When was that again?

Fuck it, I don't even know what Sheepherder is talking about any more.

Even if UO were FTP I highly doubt that Sims/Ville players would play it. Sims/Ville games are basically single player, which is one reason that TSO failed.

I gave up when I read Farmville players would bake bread in UO and like it.

I think a big reason that TSO / EAland failed was that it really didn't offer that much on the original game that didn't cost a subscription.

The person who plays Farmville today isn't going to leap into GTA tomorrow, but an evolution can occur. UO's a bad example since it is unfriendly to all but those who grew up with it but it isn't such a stretch for someone to go from FB games to some F2P browser titles and perhaps further than that if they get into gaming.

We've established that those players are ambivalent to non-browser online games when the alternative is massively superior offline games (no sub fee, more expansions/sequel).  That doesn't prove they have no interest in online games.


I just used it as an example because it had the basics of a building / crafting game hidden amidst the skull thrones and terrible UI.  UO in a browser without PK's and carpal tunnel wouldn't really be UO.  But you could probably find a sizable audience.

Cushing, unprecedented grind also had something to do with TSO's downfall.

I'd say it actually offered less than the original game. It was essentially a very poor dumbed down Sims with a very limited multiplayer (20 people?)

^ That. ^

Sims Online failed because it took what should have been an obvious fucking design decision (make my Sims be able to interact with other people's Sims Online) added a sub fee, a grind and removed all semblance of the original game, then pissed on it from a very great height.

I seem to recall reading it was somewhat successful in a certain niche, at least until Second Life came along.  :pedobear:

The cyber whores locking newbies in refrigerators niche?

I just remembered a wierd anecdote about sims online i heard a looong time ago?

Apparently cyber sex was a big deal there?  Something along the lines of it was the only meaningful thing to trade or something?  Fuck if I know, i never played the sims at all.


Anyone know anything about that, or the sims online economy?

If it were up to me, SOE could tank entirely. Hopefully sending out a message to other developers, to make them stop churning out so much shitty MMOs.

The Sims Online had some kind of player voting system, where in theory if you were being an asshole, everyone could vote you off the island or whatever.


What ended up happening is players organized into crime family's and extorted anyone else outside the group into whatever deviant thing they could think of on the threat of "do this or we'll all vote ban your account away!"  :why_so_serious:

Yeah, having trouble finding links that work, but I think Ingmar was referring to the old "underage prostitute" story that was dogging the Sims Online for a while.  Players (including kids, was the implication) were trading "services" for in-game currency.

Doesn't even need game mechanics to achieve that. Playstation Home has gangs and gang wars.

Of course, said gang wars involve standing around like a sack of potatoes and typing badly spelled insults into chat.

Player justice!

Pretty much yea  :awesome_for_real:

I don't think the mafia had any particular teeth. It was all RP as far as I know. I don't remember any way to ban you from the world primarily because there was no world in TSO, just individual houses. Obviously the owner could ban people, but not quite the same.

@Haemish (because there is no such thing as threading on forums)

In reply to your post about social media being important... I agree 100%. I think if a company set themselves up similar to a democracy, with levels of communication passing messages up and down the ladder, companies could almost get a 1:1 conversation going with many of their users.

Perhaps set up an official forum... promote community members who are active... then those promoted members would be able to talk directly with customer service/community managers who in turn could talk directly with management, etc..

Also, you are right about companies not being prepared for social media... It's not a good sight when people run into the brick wall of customer service in a public social media format.

But there is a quote button.

Do you see anyone else here doing that?
No?
That should be a clue.

 :why_so_serious: Why so serious?

Because while we are lax on many things, posting etiquette and grammar are hot buttons.

Mavor, Trippy will nuke your arse from orbit if he sees that symbol... all we can do is mock you.

(See, you can address people by using their name and a comma.  It's worked for centuries. :-P)

I'm almost tempted to hint to Trippy that "@(name)" was used somewhere.

Lantyssa, thy biting wit and scandalous tongue doth make a most enjoyable morn.

This is not Twitter. Leave that shit over there where it belongs.

 :Love_Letters: