John Smedley, President of Sony Online Entertainment, will be hosting the keynote address at this years GDC Austin. In his keynote address, Mr. Smedley will discuss the affect SOE's recently launched and wildly successful MMORPG, Free Realms, has had on expanding the base of MMOG gamers.
If the following was a screen shot of the age of conan servers, no one would be calling is wildly successful.
If it was a screenshot of the warhammer online game servers, no one would call it wildly successful.
Both of these games are looked upon as failures to different degrees, because they each lost hundreds of thousands of users in a few short months after each sold close to a million copies each. (each game can also fill up more servers than the following screen shot also)
For whatever reason, people keep calling free realms wildly successful, yet it can't even fill up 2 servers. That isn't even close to the number of decent population server of AoC and Warhammer in comparison.
This is they guy they are going to get to keynote mmo design? The best he can offer is bragging about millions of people who signed up for his game, but don't play it. What can he possibly offer other than snake oil?
The last line of his keynote description makes me laugh: "... how developers can re-educate their teams to move from stagnant and dated MMO design toward mass market success." That is soooo funny coming from smed.
This is the server status of free realms right now. Occasionally server 1 gets to "high" population, but thats it.
Mike I don't know if the quote above was your write-up or it was just a cut/paste of the GDC text, so I don't really know who to address.
Comments
If the following was a screen shot of the age of conan servers, no one would be calling is wildly successful.
If it was a screenshot of the warhammer online game servers, no one would call it wildly successful.
Both of these games are looked upon as failures to different degrees, because they each lost hundreds of thousands of users in a few short months after each sold close to a million copies each. (each game can also fill up more servers than the following screen shot also)
For whatever reason, people keep calling free realms wildly successful, yet it can't even fill up 2 servers. That isn't even close to the number of decent population server of AoC and Warhammer in comparison.
This is they guy they are going to get to keynote mmo design? The best he can offer is bragging about millions of people who signed up for his game, but don't play it. What can he possibly offer other than snake oil?
The last line of his keynote description makes me laugh: "... how developers can re-educate their teams to move from stagnant and dated MMO design toward mass market success." That is soooo funny coming from smed.
This is the server status of free realms right now. Occasionally server 1 gets to "high" population, but thats it.
Mike I don't know if the quote above was your write-up or it was just a cut/paste of the GDC text, so I don't really know who to address.