Massive layoffs at SOE?

[Mrbloodworth]

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.

[UnSub]

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!"?

[Samprimary]

[Mrbloodworth]

   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 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!"?

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

[Paelos]

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.

[Amaron]

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.

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.

[Goreschach]

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.

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.

[UnSub]

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.

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).

[HaemishM]

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.

[Velorath]

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.

[UnSub]

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.

[Margalis]

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.

[Amaron]

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

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.

[Margalis]

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

[Goreschach]

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.

[Merusk]

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.

[Goreschach]

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.

[Sand]

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.

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.

[Amaron]

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. 

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.

[Merusk]

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

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.

[Ratman_tf]

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

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.

[Amaron]

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

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.   

[Nija]

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

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.

[UnSub]

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.

[Velorath]

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.

[Nebu]

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

[HaemishM]

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.

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. 

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.

[Margalis]

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

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.

[Fordel]

Grandma shoots a mean battle rifle!

[Ratman_tf]

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. 

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.

[Venkman]

HOWEVER, the main thrust of PS2 is to correct many of those flaws, and modernize the engine to that updating is even POSSIBLE.

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.

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.

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.

[Sheepherder]

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.

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

[Goreschach]

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.

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.

[palmer_eldritch]

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.

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.  

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.

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.

[Sheepherder]

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.

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.

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