Check this guy's track record and the games he has had a hand in. A lot of them are some of the best RPGs. He was behind the original concepts of most of the Final Fantasy games, ending at 9, and skipping 3 and 8.
It wasn't just because he was at Square either, the last RPG he put out was Lost Odyssey for the 360, and if you haven't played it, you should.
Lost Odyssey is one of the great secret games of the 360. Probably the best JRPG on it.
He also did Last Story though, on the Wii in January 2011, which I would really like to play.
I kind of pictured the meeting going like this 'I want to call this game Final Fantasy' '... you can't. Square Enix owns the rights' 'Well get me an English thesaurus then!'
Check this guy's track record and the games he has had a hand in. A lot of them are some of the best RPGs. He was behind the original concepts of most of the Final Fantasy games, ending at 9, and skipping 3 and 8.
It wasn't just because he was at Square either, the last RPG he put out was Lost Odyssey for the 360, and if you haven't played it, you should.
Lost Odyssey is one of the great secret games of the 360. Probably the best JRPG on it.
He also did Last Story though, on the Wii in January 2011, which I would really like to play.
I kind of pictured the meeting going like this 'I want to call this game Final Fantasy' '... you can't. Square Enix owns the rights' 'Well get me an English thesaurus then!'
Heh, I was actually thinking the same when I read about 'Last Story' and saw the logo of 'Last Story'
Is Lost Odyssey really that good? To what can I compare it with, as good as FF games used to be, same production value as well?
As for Sakaguchi's leaving, iirc he was responsible for the Final Fantasy movie, when they lost more than 100 million dollars on it, well maybe in former times people committed harakiri but Sakaguchi did the next best thing and stepped down. It was shortly after that Square merged with Enix. One might wonder if that merge would have taken place if the movie had been a great success or if the movie hadn't been made at all.
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums: Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Heh, I was actually thinking the same when I read about 'Last Story' and saw the logo of 'Last Story'
Is Lost Odyssey really that good? To what can I compare it with, as good as FF games used to be, same production value as well?
As for Sakaguchi's leaving, iirc he was responsible for the Final Fantasy movie, when they lost more than 100 million dollars on it, well maybe in former times people committed harakiri but Sakaguchi did the next best thing and stepped down. It was shortly after that Square merged with Enix. One might wonder if that merge would have taken place if the movie had been a great success or if the movie hadn't been made at all.
I would say... Lost Odyssey is better than some of the later Final Fantasy games.
I REALLY like the original art, and the game art itself is pretty good.
The world design is fantastic at times. The monster design isn't bad. If somebody told me it was a Final Fantasy game I'd basically say 'There's no moogles or chocobos, or any of the classic summons, but you ALMOST fooled me.'
It has some pretty, fairly well directed cut scenes.
Probably the most plain part is the battle system, which does not have any particular innovation, though the camera system in it is pretty decent (Cinematic camera angles to run up and slash somebody, nyar.)
I think the budget is lower than a Final Fantasy game, but not so much so that it really shows.
Also, it is fully voiced for cut scenes (Not necessarily the 'talk to people in town' parts.) in about 6 different languages, and you can swap them on the fly. So if you want all your evil guards to speak German, all your women to speak Italian, the nobles to speak French and the main character to speak Japanese, this is perfectly possible.
Not that I did that (For more than 2 hours of the game)
It does suffer from a couple bad design choices, like one of the worst minigames of all time. (Note. You do NOT make a really dramatic moment and an important funeral scene better by including a ceremonial minigame in the middle of it. Unless you define better as 'totally destroying any emotion you were building up')
Luclin, memory is a little fuzzy... was that the one that made all the buildings float in the air?
Good times... good times.
Was there floating buildings in that one? I know it was a huge expansion and alot of it was unfinished. There were a few cities that were gigantic but I remember they weren't very populated.
Maybe you are thinking of the Plane of Air. I think that had floating buildings.
Check this guy's track record and the games he has had a hand in. A lot of them are some of the best RPGs. He was behind the original concepts of most of the Final Fantasy games, ending at 9, and skipping 3 and 8.
It wasn't just because he was at Square either, the last RPG he put out was Lost Odyssey for the 360, and if you haven't played it, you should.
Lost Odyssey is one of the great secret games of the 360. Probably the best JRPG on it.
He also did Last Story though, on the Wii in January 2011, which I would really like to play.
I kind of pictured the meeting going like this 'I want to call this game Final Fantasy' '... you can't. Square Enix owns the rights' 'Well get me an English thesaurus then!'
Heh, I was actually thinking the same when I read about 'Last Story' and saw the logo of 'Last Story'
Is Lost Odyssey really that good? To what can I compare it with, as good as FF games used to be, same production value as well?
As for Sakaguchi's leaving, iirc he was responsible for the Final Fantasy movie, when they lost more than 100 million dollars on it, well maybe in former times people committed harakiri but Sakaguchi did the next best thing and stepped down. It was shortly after that Square merged with Enix. One might wonder if that merge would have taken place if the movie had been a great success or if the movie hadn't been made at all.
I didn't think Lost Odyssey was very good at all, to be honest. It bored me to tears and felt clunky to play. But that's just me. The FF movie was a travesty as well. Nice CGI but horrible script.
I didn't think Lost Odyssey was very good at all, to be honest. It bored me to tears and felt clunky to play. But that's just me. The FF movie was a travesty as well. Nice CGI but horrible script.
Well, I compared it to more recent FF games, and to be honest, I don't think those are very good either, in many ways. :>
'Best JRPG on the 360' is not the world's BEST compliment, either. :>
Originally posted by Creslin321 Also, look at the same of the city "Qeynos" backwards and tell me Sony didn't make EQ .
I never saw that before! Dang... I liked starting in Qeynos, too... grumble mumble
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
I have been saying for ages that this guy is the biggest enemy of SoE, not only he gave the green light to the NGE project for SWG, but it turned EQ2 in a WoW clone, he wasted money in Free Realms (Kids do not have credit cards dear John) and wasted even more money and time with 2 console games which were doomed from the word go, DCU and The Agency (R.I.P.)
I'm not a fan of Smedley, but this needs perspective:
Free Realms is highly profitable! Kids don't have credit cards, but their parents do.
Consoles are the next big market for MMOs. Playstation Home, that crippled Second-Life-impersonator, is highly profitable too. We've seen the first few competitors get bloody noses, but they will learn and improve. It should have been obvious that you can't just copy a PC MMO, it needs to be designed for controller input from the ground up. Sony seemed to get the message earlier then SE, but still managed to fumble in the end by failing to market DCUO to the right audience. The next attempt will be better, no doubt.
I didn't think Lost Odyssey was very good at all, to be honest. It bored me to tears and felt clunky to play. But that's just me. The FF movie was a travesty as well. Nice CGI but horrible script.
Well, I compared it to more recent FF games, and to be honest, I don't think those are very good either, in many ways. :>
'Best JRPG on the 360' is not the world's BEST compliment, either. :>
Though apparently I liked it more than you!
Heheh, fair enough. Yeah, for me, the last great FF game was FFXI. Although, I personally didn't enjoy FFIX as much as everyone else did. I liked where FFVIII was taking us with more realistic character models and they went the other way with IX, /sigh.
I actually played Lost Odyssey on PC, as I don't own an Xbox and don't ever plan to. If I were to compare it to modern FF games, then yeah, it felt similar to FFXIII in some ways.
I think the FF games need a "reboot". Hehe, maybe go back to the originals and use their mechanics and story but make them with today's graphics and music. Maybe change up the mechanics a little bit, since turn based combat is a bit archaic anymore. Just a thought, probably won't ever happen. But it might help them get that old vibe back and realize oh yeah, this is why we make games.
For SOE, I think they have 2 more chances here, maybe 3. I'm hoping they have plans to repopulate VG with devs from SWG, but I'm not holding my breath on that one. BUt they have Planetside Next to bring that crowd back and Everquest Next to come full circle. Based on some forum posts and interview quotes with SOE, I'm thinking they might be trying bring back sandbox elements to Everquest in Everquest Next. Plus their few tidbits from Planetside Next look promising as well as a vague post about showing us the VG road map or something or other any day now.
I'm still rooting for SOE and Square, but if they mess up their next/current projects in anyway, I think it could mean The End for them. Time will tell.
Never did play the final fanstasy mmo, so no comment about that. I think eq started going downhill in its early years when they were pushing out heavily bug ridden expansions, all the care about the gamer was lost to push it out faster and draw more money. This caused a lot of players to move on and look for better developers. Also the new stuff coming out was just that... newer, better in every way and had a lot of draw on its own. It was a natural progression to newer better things helped out by poor development standards.
I have been saying for ages that this guy is the biggest enemy of SoE, not only he gave the green light to the NGE project for SWG, but it turned EQ2 in a WoW clone, he wasted money in Free Realms (Kids do not have credit cards dear John) and wasted even more money and time with 2 console games which were doomed from the word go, DCU and The Agency (R.I.P.)
I'm not a fan of Smedley, but this needs perspective:
Free Realms is highly profitable! Kids don't have credit cards, but their parents do.
A 10 y/o kid do not have the same whining power of a 14 y/o brat who blank his parents forever until they get what he wants
It makes a big difference
I would also say that if any parents allow their children to get hooked to online games so early on, are not good parents
So I am confident that the target audiance of Free Realms do not really exists, If it is still going is because grown up girls play it.
The only experience I have with SOE was during my time in SWG, which was during the NGE period. In my opinion SOE's biggest problem is its unwillingness to listen to its customers.
The myth that SoE doesnt listen to their customers is just beyond ridiculous. The more accurate thing is they sometimes dont know when and when not to listen.
SWG is a completely unique case, because they werent trying to appease current customers for whatever reason.
EQ1 they DID listen to customers all the time, and every single change that people now say they hated about PoP was community requested. People wanted faster travel, people wanted to be able to mroe easily meet up with their friends. And maybe since EQ's population peaked years past PoP SoE listened to the right people? Maybe, maybe not.
And the funny thing about GoD is in retrospect people that go through the content seem to like it, at least from my experiences on progression servers. It was just poorly tuned and had basically zero content for casuals. Worth noting was they followed it with OoW which casuals embraced
For SOE, I think they have 2 more chances here, maybe 3. I'm hoping they have plans to repopulate VG with devs from SWG, but I'm not holding my breath on that one. BUt they have Planetside Next to bring that crowd back and Everquest Next to come full circle. Based on some forum posts and interview quotes with SOE, I'm thinking they might be trying bring back sandbox elements to Everquest in Everquest Next. Plus their few tidbits from Planetside Next look promising as well as a vague post about showing us the VG road map or something or other any day now.
I'm still rooting for SOE and Square, but if they mess up their next/current projects in anyway, I think it could mean The End for them. Time will tell.
I dont see them investing money into VG. Bottom line is not enough people play it, and that was when they were doing regular updates to it. I would like to see what happens if they announced a heavy development cycle for it as an experiment, but I doubt it would get back over even 50k if they announced that.
Of their major titles they are batting .500. EQ was a major success, EQ2 is also moderately successful and is really well respected by the 'mature' crowd. SWG was a complete disaster pre and post NGE and DCUO has not fared well.
SQuare is also batting .500 with MMOs but of course only have 2 games to judge. And really its too early to call FFXIV (or DCUO for that matter) a failure, though it seems likely both will be.
I dont think many companies are batting any higher. A Few companies are 1-1 (Blizzard, ArenaNet, CCCP, Trion(so far)) but I dont think any companies with multiple titles have had accross the board success.
Of their major titles they are batting .500. EQ was a major success, EQ2 is also moderately successful and is really well respected by the 'mature' crowd. SWG was a complete disaster pre and post NGE and DCUO has not fared well.
EQ was made before SOE was an entity. SOE as a game division purchased the game after it was already a massive success.
EQ2 failed to meet initial expectations and was closing servers within a year. Some success after the game stabilized, but this is the best SOE has ever done and it was about 40% of what the original EQ did.
SWG initial success, but SOE snatched defeat from the jaws of success there.
Planetside was a minor success for a short while until SOE changed it to the point most players left.
DCU is the fastest selling SOE game, but also the fastest SOE game to need server mergers. Biggest failure yet.
The Agency was so bad that it was scrapped after five years of development and tens of millions of dollars invested.
Their less "major" titles have also been less than success stories as well. MTG:Tactics, Free Realms, CloneWars Adventures, all the facebook games, The Matric Online, Vanguard.
Every title that has been created under the leadership of SOE has managed to drive at least half of their playerbase in the first year or so. I would hardly call that "batting 500". Something has been going very wrong with SOE for a very long time.
I don't think either developer ever had much 'touch'. They took advantage of being two early MMO developers back when there wasn't as much competition.
With competent competition they have now been pushed into below-average status.
I don't think either developer ever had much 'touch'. They took advantage of being two early MMO developers back when there wasn't as much competition.
With competent competition they have now been pushed into below-average status.
I don't think either developer ever had much 'touch'. They took advantage of being two early MMO developers back when there wasn't as much competition.
With competent competition they have now been pushed into below-average status.
Ya, I know. SOE with over 10 million concurrent subscribers with FreeRealms averaging nearly 3x the subscription model with F2P per customer and Blizzard with nearly 13 million concurrent paid subscribers and approaching $2 Billion a year in revenue, ya... they have both definately lost it and below average. Both companies should be shutting down really soon.
I don't think either developer ever had much 'touch'. They took advantage of being two early MMO developers back when there wasn't as much competition.
With competent competition they have now been pushed into below-average status.
Ya, I know. SOE with over 10 million concurrent subscribers with FreeRealms averaging nearly 3x the subscription model with F2P per customer and Blizzard with nearly 13 million concurrent paid subscribers and approaching $2 Billion a year in revenue, ya... they have both definately lost it and below average. Both companies should be shutting down really soon.
The OP poster was talking about SE and SOE not Blizzard. SOE, when there wasn't much competion, was a major developer. Same with SE but now FFXIV is a disaster. And you can talk about the 'success' of Free Realms until you are blue in the face. Just recently SOE fired a third of their employees, canceled an MMO and shut down several studios. You don't do that when things are going well.
Ya, I know. SOE with over 10 million concurrent subscribers with FreeRealms averaging nearly 3x the subscription model with F2P per customer and Blizzard with nearly 13 million concurrent paid subscribers and approaching $2 Billion a year in revenue, ya... they have both definately lost it and below average. Both companies should be shutting down really soon.
If Free Realms had 10 million subscribers then SOE would not have just laid off 1/3 of their entire work force, closed down 3 of their game development studios and terminated a mmo project that was already 5 years into development.
Free Realms would also have more than 10 servers and at least 1 of them would be able to hit medium or heavy load if they had anything near 100,000 active players.
Right now there are 35 total people using the free realms forums.
Ya, I know. SOE with over 10 million concurrent subscribers with FreeRealms averaging nearly 3x the subscription model with F2P per customer and Blizzard with nearly 13 million concurrent paid subscribers and approaching $2 Billion a year in revenue, ya... they have both definately lost it and below average. Both companies should be shutting down really soon.
If Free Realms had 10 million subscribers then SOE would not have just laid off 1/3 of their entire work force, closed down 3 of their game development studios and terminated a mmo project that was already 5 years into development.
Free Realms would also have more than 10 servers and at least 1 of them would be able to hit medium or heavy load if they had anything near 100,000 active players.
Right now there are 35 total people using the free realms forums.
Take it up with SOE, they are the ones who advertise 10 million subscribers for FreeRealms, not me. I'm just passing along the info.
Comments
Lost Odyssey is one of the great secret games of the 360. Probably the best JRPG on it.
He also did Last Story though, on the Wii in January 2011, which I would really like to play.
I kind of pictured the meeting going like this 'I want to call this game Final Fantasy' '... you can't. Square Enix owns the rights' 'Well get me an English thesaurus then!'
Heh, I was actually thinking the same when I read about 'Last Story' and saw the logo of 'Last Story'
Is Lost Odyssey really that good? To what can I compare it with, as good as FF games used to be, same production value as well?
As for Sakaguchi's leaving, iirc he was responsible for the Final Fantasy movie, when they lost more than 100 million dollars on it, well maybe in former times people committed harakiri but Sakaguchi did the next best thing and stepped down. It was shortly after that Square merged with Enix. One might wonder if that merge would have taken place if the movie had been a great success or if the movie hadn't been made at all.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
I would say... Lost Odyssey is better than some of the later Final Fantasy games.
I REALLY like the original art, and the game art itself is pretty good.
The world design is fantastic at times. The monster design isn't bad. If somebody told me it was a Final Fantasy game I'd basically say 'There's no moogles or chocobos, or any of the classic summons, but you ALMOST fooled me.'
It has some pretty, fairly well directed cut scenes.
Probably the most plain part is the battle system, which does not have any particular innovation, though the camera system in it is pretty decent (Cinematic camera angles to run up and slash somebody, nyar.)
I think the budget is lower than a Final Fantasy game, but not so much so that it really shows.
Also, it is fully voiced for cut scenes (Not necessarily the 'talk to people in town' parts.) in about 6 different languages, and you can swap them on the fly. So if you want all your evil guards to speak German, all your women to speak Italian, the nobles to speak French and the main character to speak Japanese, this is perfectly possible.
Not that I did that (For more than 2 hours of the game)
It does suffer from a couple bad design choices, like one of the worst minigames of all time. (Note. You do NOT make a really dramatic moment and an important funeral scene better by including a ceremonial minigame in the middle of it. Unless you define better as 'totally destroying any emotion you were building up')
When Wow came to the scene and grabbed all their sub, both EQ2 and SWG failed hard, or at least didn't succeed as they should have.
The rest is irrevelent honestly.
Was there floating buildings in that one? I know it was a huge expansion and alot of it was unfinished. There were a few cities that were gigantic but I remember they weren't very populated.
Maybe you are thinking of the Plane of Air. I think that had floating buildings.
It's been a long time for me too!
I didn't think Lost Odyssey was very good at all, to be honest. It bored me to tears and felt clunky to play. But that's just me. The FF movie was a travesty as well. Nice CGI but horrible script.
Well, I compared it to more recent FF games, and to be honest, I don't think those are very good either, in many ways. :>
'Best JRPG on the 360' is not the world's BEST compliment, either. :>
Though apparently I liked it more than you!
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
sony lost me when the ceo said nothing good ever came from the internett, will google search and post a link.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090515/1301064900.shtml
I'm not a fan of Smedley, but this needs perspective:
Free Realms is highly profitable! Kids don't have credit cards, but their parents do.
Consoles are the next big market for MMOs. Playstation Home, that crippled Second-Life-impersonator, is highly profitable too. We've seen the first few competitors get bloody noses, but they will learn and improve. It should have been obvious that you can't just copy a PC MMO, it needs to be designed for controller input from the ground up. Sony seemed to get the message earlier then SE, but still managed to fumble in the end by failing to market DCUO to the right audience. The next attempt will be better, no doubt.
Heheh, fair enough. Yeah, for me, the last great FF game was FFXI. Although, I personally didn't enjoy FFIX as much as everyone else did. I liked where FFVIII was taking us with more realistic character models and they went the other way with IX, /sigh.
I actually played Lost Odyssey on PC, as I don't own an Xbox and don't ever plan to. If I were to compare it to modern FF games, then yeah, it felt similar to FFXIII in some ways.
I think the FF games need a "reboot". Hehe, maybe go back to the originals and use their mechanics and story but make them with today's graphics and music. Maybe change up the mechanics a little bit, since turn based combat is a bit archaic anymore. Just a thought, probably won't ever happen. But it might help them get that old vibe back and realize oh yeah, this is why we make games.
For SOE, I think they have 2 more chances here, maybe 3. I'm hoping they have plans to repopulate VG with devs from SWG, but I'm not holding my breath on that one. BUt they have Planetside Next to bring that crowd back and Everquest Next to come full circle. Based on some forum posts and interview quotes with SOE, I'm thinking they might be trying bring back sandbox elements to Everquest in Everquest Next. Plus their few tidbits from Planetside Next look promising as well as a vague post about showing us the VG road map or something or other any day now.
I'm still rooting for SOE and Square, but if they mess up their next/current projects in anyway, I think it could mean The End for them. Time will tell.
Never did play the final fanstasy mmo, so no comment about that. I think eq started going downhill in its early years when they were pushing out heavily bug ridden expansions, all the care about the gamer was lost to push it out faster and draw more money. This caused a lot of players to move on and look for better developers. Also the new stuff coming out was just that... newer, better in every way and had a lot of draw on its own. It was a natural progression to newer better things helped out by poor development standards.
A 10 y/o kid do not have the same whining power of a 14 y/o brat who blank his parents forever until they get what he wants
It makes a big difference
I would also say that if any parents allow their children to get hooked to online games so early on, are not good parents
So I am confident that the target audiance of Free Realms do not really exists, If it is still going is because grown up girls play it.
I'm sorry but WoW and Quality do not belong in the same sentence.
Um... yes they do. WoW is a highly polished game.
Dumbed down does not equal low quality.
The myth that SoE doesnt listen to their customers is just beyond ridiculous. The more accurate thing is they sometimes dont know when and when not to listen.
SWG is a completely unique case, because they werent trying to appease current customers for whatever reason.
EQ1 they DID listen to customers all the time, and every single change that people now say they hated about PoP was community requested. People wanted faster travel, people wanted to be able to mroe easily meet up with their friends. And maybe since EQ's population peaked years past PoP SoE listened to the right people? Maybe, maybe not.
And the funny thing about GoD is in retrospect people that go through the content seem to like it, at least from my experiences on progression servers. It was just poorly tuned and had basically zero content for casuals. Worth noting was they followed it with OoW which casuals embraced
I dont see them investing money into VG. Bottom line is not enough people play it, and that was when they were doing regular updates to it. I would like to see what happens if they announced a heavy development cycle for it as an experiment, but I doubt it would get back over even 50k if they announced that.
Of their major titles they are batting .500. EQ was a major success, EQ2 is also moderately successful and is really well respected by the 'mature' crowd. SWG was a complete disaster pre and post NGE and DCUO has not fared well.
SQuare is also batting .500 with MMOs but of course only have 2 games to judge. And really its too early to call FFXIV (or DCUO for that matter) a failure, though it seems likely both will be.
I dont think many companies are batting any higher. A Few companies are 1-1 (Blizzard, ArenaNet, CCCP, Trion(so far)) but I dont think any companies with multiple titles have had accross the board success.
EQ was made before SOE was an entity. SOE as a game division purchased the game after it was already a massive success.
EQ2 failed to meet initial expectations and was closing servers within a year. Some success after the game stabilized, but this is the best SOE has ever done and it was about 40% of what the original EQ did.
SWG initial success, but SOE snatched defeat from the jaws of success there.
Planetside was a minor success for a short while until SOE changed it to the point most players left.
DCU is the fastest selling SOE game, but also the fastest SOE game to need server mergers. Biggest failure yet.
The Agency was so bad that it was scrapped after five years of development and tens of millions of dollars invested.
Their less "major" titles have also been less than success stories as well. MTG:Tactics, Free Realms, CloneWars Adventures, all the facebook games, The Matric Online, Vanguard.
Every title that has been created under the leadership of SOE has managed to drive at least half of their playerbase in the first year or so. I would hardly call that "batting 500". Something has been going very wrong with SOE for a very long time.
I don't think either developer ever had much 'touch'. They took advantage of being two early MMO developers back when there wasn't as much competition.
With competent competition they have now been pushed into below-average status.
I agree with this completely.
He who keeps his cool best wins.
Ya, I know. SOE with over 10 million concurrent subscribers with FreeRealms averaging nearly 3x the subscription model with F2P per customer and Blizzard with nearly 13 million concurrent paid subscribers and approaching $2 Billion a year in revenue, ya... they have both definately lost it and below average. Both companies should be shutting down really soon.
Power to the Sheeple
The OP poster was talking about SE and SOE not Blizzard. SOE, when there wasn't much competion, was a major developer. Same with SE but now FFXIV is a disaster. And you can talk about the 'success' of Free Realms until you are blue in the face. Just recently SOE fired a third of their employees, canceled an MMO and shut down several studios. You don't do that when things are going well.
If Free Realms had 10 million subscribers then SOE would not have just laid off 1/3 of their entire work force, closed down 3 of their game development studios and terminated a mmo project that was already 5 years into development.
Free Realms would also have more than 10 servers and at least 1 of them would be able to hit medium or heavy load if they had anything near 100,000 active players.
Right now there are 35 total people using the free realms forums.
Take it up with SOE, they are the ones who advertise 10 million subscribers for FreeRealms, not me. I'm just passing along the info.
Power to the Sheeple