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Similar pattern between EQ & V:SoH
DijonCyanide
Member UncommonPosts: 586
i had quit EQ b/c of SOE's customer service during the massive roll-back of 2005. i admit i still miss the EQ community & playing my MNK, it's still a pretty good game just not for beginning players. i had been playing Guild Wars off & on to "Quench" my appetite till Vanguard released. With the Sigil & SOE probable merger i'll definitely reconsider.
EQ started out a similar way as this Vanguard seems to be between Verant, now Sigil, & the behemoth SOE. Even though i'm sure Vanguard will be a good game my hopes now cannot help but be deminished & i'll be reluctant to even try Vanguard if it's just another online game for Brad & company to eventually ... again ... sell off to SOE.
Not the best decision/beginning for Vanguard indeed! 
Comments
SOE merged with Verant, even if namelly SOE bought verant. The fact is that SOE(the original company) was dismantled and Verant was renamed SOE.
Source:
Brad on Verant and SOE
Link to the article: http://www.contextmag.com/setFrameRedirect.asp?src=/archives/200106/Feature4HomewardBound.asp
Here is a history lesson for you...
"The child is father of the man," William Wordsworth wrote in 1802. Nearly 200 years
later, Sony Corp. used that idea to develop a hugely successful role-playing
game that changed how the company thinks about online entertainment.
The game, EverQuest—archly dubbed "EverCrack," for its addictive qualities—began as a project
inside an American unit of Sony. The idea was to develop a fantasy game in which tens of thousands
of people could adopt roles and play in cooperation with each other online. [For more on how
EverQuest is played, see accompanying article.] Sony, afraid of being an overbearing parent,
sent its game-developer offspring out into the world in 1998 as an independent company known
as Verant Interactive Inc.. Sony’s progeny prospered. When Verant introduced
EverQuest in 1999, it became the most successful online role-playing game ever.
By 2000, Sony was ready to make the child the father of the man. It bought back the 80% of Verant
that it didn’t own and gave the company’s management responsibility for a host of Sony’s other
online-game-development activities. That strategy, too, seems to be working. Sony has been able
to exploit the opportunity presented by EverQuest by bringing to bear far more resources than
Verant could have mustered on its own. Sony also hopes that Verant will be able to work its
magic on the other online projects that it now controls.
In other words, at a time when many companies are debating whether to set up innovative
ventures either as separate companies or as part of the core business, Sony’s answer: Both.
By choosing that answer, Sony has created an inspirational dot-coming-of-age story. Already,
EverQuest generates $70 million a year in revenue for Sony through sales of software and
through the monthly subscription fee that nearly 400,000 users pay to keep playing. EverQuest
has also given Sony a huge lead over rivals in online games, which many expect to become a
mainstream form of entertainment. Sony executives think EverQuest could be the MTV of the
online world—the breakthrough idea that finally takes full advantage of the entertainment
capabilities of a new medium, just as MTV did for cable TV.
By 1996, online role-playing games had thrived among college kids for more than a decade. But
the games were played via text, not graphics, and they amounted to just a niche. A teeny-weeny
niche.
Brad McQuaid, who was then working for a Sony software design team in San Diego, had a
brainstorm. With Internet connections getting faster and faster, he envisioned a virtual
game with mind-blowing 3D graphics that could be played by thousands at a time and would
find an audience beyond college-age kids. He asked his bosses to experiment.
There were major concerns. An ambitious game like EverQuest, which has 24,000 computer-generated
characters, is expensive. It would take years to build. Sony had no assurance people would buy
the game software in the first place, let alone cough up a monthly fee like cable-TV subscribers
to keep playing.
John Smedley, a designer at
the time, argued to senior executives that, no matter what happened
with EverQuest, the company needed to get back into developing games
that would be played on a personal computer. At the time, all internal
game development focused on the PlayStation, a Sony game machine that
reigned as the most successful Sony product launch since the Walkman.
Sony executives went along,
figuring that, even if the attempts at a PC-based game didn’t work out,
the EverQuest group’s skills could be translated to the next generation
of PlayStation games. McQuaid, who became EverQuest’s executive
producer, slowly built his team from two to 20.
But, by late 1998, it became
clear the EverQuest work wouldn’t apply to the PlayStation. In
addition, development costs for EverQuest were escalating.
"We realized the PC group was pretty self-contained and would become increasingly a distraction to our core
business," says Kelly Flock, who at the time headed both the PlayStation and PC game-design efforts.
He went to Japan and
convinced executives at headquarters that, while EverQuest and the
whole area of online games looked very promising, its developers should
be spun out into an independent entity. Sony contracted with them to
finish EverQuest but gave them the freedom to sign up another source of
funds to publish the other games they had under development.
It’s not that Flock or anyone
else at Sony had a grand plan when they spun out Verant. Sony seemingly
made Verant independent simply because that’s what it does with
projects that don’t fit internally. David Cole, president of DFC Intelligence,
a video-game market research firm, says: "It seems like Sony is
constantly spinning things off. I’ve almost given up trying to keep
up."
Flock, himself,
admits the experience was serendipitous. "If we’d known that Verant was
going to be the model of a successful online entertainment publisher,"
he says, "we would have tried to immediately" make Verant the core of
Sony’s online-game work.
Still, the benefits of having
Verant be independent were clear. "It was certainly easier to retain
those people who were beginning to chafe a bit about being kind of an
after-thought" in a business focused on the PlayStation, Flock says.
The benefits of the Verant
strategy became even clearer on March 16, 1999, when EverQuest was
launched. More than 12,000 subscribers jammed the company’s servers
that day. By the end of the first week, 40,000 eager gamers had
subscribed. There were so many that thousands got booted in midplay,
while others found the game obnoxiously slow. Jeff Butler, who set up
Verant’s customer-service department, remembers the company’s Internet
service provider running
an additional underground fiber-optic line from Los Angeles to Verant’s
offices in San Diego in just seven days to meet the demand.
While EverQuest’s developers
had initially dreamed of someday having 70,000 subscribers, 225,000
copies of the software had been sold within six months, and EverQuest
had 150,000 active subscribers. By now, EverQuest has sold more than a
million copies of the base game software at $39.95 a copy. Sony also
collects $9.95 a month from each person who subscribes to play the
game—and its numbers are growing by about 20,000 people every 30 days.
As EverQuest’s revenue kept
climbing, Sony executives saw that subscription-based games had huge
potential;
to that point, Sony’s Sony Online unit offered only free games,
supported by advertising, that were online versions of brands such as Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. EverQuest’s explosive growth also made it clear that Verant, with 70 employees, didn’t have the resources
to take full advantage of its hit.
As it turns out, Verant
hadn’t strayed far from Sony: Besides having the contract to develop
EverQuest and having Sony retain a stake in Verant, the Verant
management team had picked a Sony unit to finance the other multiplayer
games it was creating. So, the transaction was relatively
straightforward when Sony Online bought the rest of Verant on May 31,
2000.
"The good news for EverQuest
is that Sony allowed it to go outside to develop but then didn’t lose
sight of it," says Heidi Mason, managing director of Bell-Mason Group,
which advises companies on creating and managing ventures.
Following the acquisition,
Sony Online closed its New York offices and transferred headquarters to
Verant’s offices in San Diego. With that, the experiment in the niche
of role-playing games subsumed Sony Online’s old business model.
Flock, who was named chief
executive of Sony Online after the deal was completed, says: "The
creative vision of the Verant guys...led toward an epiphany for senior
management at Sony."
Although Verant’s
employees had returned to a giant corporation, they were now in a
division focused entirely on online games. Their vision of the future
of games ruled. They could get all the marketing support they needed.
By this spring, Verant’s 70
employees had become a group of 370 at Sony Online, so the company has
added office space, moving into a second building. But little else has
changed at the new/old headquarters. The red Verant Interactive logo
even remains displayed on the original four-story, black-glass office
building.
Executives have done "a
fantastic job of keeping a small-company atmosphere in a big company,"
says Gordon Wrinn, who has been with Verant since 1999. "We’re really
flexible. We can really get things done in a quick and orderly way
without the needless bureaucracy that sometimes is part of a big
company."
McQuaid says the combination
of Verant’s culture and Sony’s resources has even attracted several of
the developers who created Electronic Arts’ Ultima Online, EverQuest’s
competitor.
"I think we’re pretty well-positioned for the future," he says.
To build that future, Sony is
pouring EverQuest profits back into designing new games. For one, Sony
next year will launch Star Wars Galaxies, a role-playing game that it
is developing and will manage for LucasArts Entertainment Co.. Flock says major brands such as Star Wars are needed
to help online games keep reaching an ever-larger audience.
"We’re not quite at the point
where [online gaming makes its breakthrough] and becomes a million
players and then jumps to 20 million over the course of two years," he
says. But, he adds, "at some point it’s going to do" that.
Research firm Forrester Research Inc.
says the growing availability of high-speed access to the Internet will
help online games account for nearly one-fourth of interactive
entertainment revenue by 2004, up from just 2% last year. Already,
online gaming is the most successful form of Web entertainment this
side of pornography.
McQuaid declares: "This industry will grow over the next five to 10 years. I think it will rival mainstream movies."
i honestly dont think the sigil team has the staying power .. i think sigil was created for one reason .. to be sold off and to make the founders rich ..
if you look at the employees of sigil they are a mish mash of ex soe ex microsoft employees/developers .. and they dont even seem to jive well together ...
even reading their posts on their own site ...they each address people's concerns with their own style and often contradicting what the other one says ...
just like billgates has the money to retire ... in fact he has enough money to buy the world .. yet he continues to shark any market microsoft can get into cuz he just does it cuz he likes it?
dont be so naive brad is in it for the money
Neurox1.. you are freaking ridiculous! I see you posting all over the place, talking about people unfound accusations or statements.. and you come out and say shit like this that has no evidence. Sure money may be nice for Brad but who is to say that is his main motive.. gawd just get off the forums if you are hate the game so much now AND are not going to look at anything from two sides. We dont know forsure why Brad is in it.. but ill sure as hell take his word much more highly than yours.
Kalade
About the contradicting each other - hmm... haven't seen it myself, but since it happens "often" it shouldn't be hard for you to post at least one example of what you mean.
just like billgates has the money to retire ... in fact he has enough money to buy the world .. yet he continues to shark any market microsoft can get into cuz he just does it cuz he likes it?
dont be so naive brad is in it for the money
Well, Brad didn't have any choice with EQ. He never really owned it all anyway. He owns Sigil. He owns Vanguard. And he is already working on getting other titles which says to me he isn't making one game to sell off, but he is making a company so he can keep the money rolling in for years to come.
BTW, I'm not niave. I do think Brad is in it for the money (as much as I believe you are just here to troll). And I think he knows how much more money he would have made if he had been able to buy out EQ from SOE instead of the other way around. He may have made out well in the deal, but if he owned EQ today he would have made out far better.
I've seen you post a lot of idotic things (like the soe access pass thingy), where you seem to take second hand information and make it reality even if it is false. But that one just made the list of the most idiotic one.
They have their different styles? Could it be that they are 90+ employees who do not all talk together all the time. They are teams who work on different aspects. But that they are not posting in one "drone" way, I find it quite redicilous that you would want that.
And creating the company only to sell it? That's perhaps even dumber. The founders ARE rich. EQ made them rich. Odds are the royalties and founding from EQ put them into a financial position most of us can only dream of.
In all seriousness. Why are you on these forums if all you are gonna do is sprout nonsense, and untrue statements. The above is not one of the "untrue" ones, as it is an opinion (abeit a silly one) and can't be proven either way. It seems you are just making things up offhand and writing them in ways to make them fit your viewpoints even if they are false. If you don't want the game. Don't buy it. If you think it is all "for teh money" then, don't buy it. But why keep posting if that is how you feel?
If it is to change peoples minds, then using redicilous analogies and false information is not really the right way to go.
please stay on topic droigan
" its another to attack one's opinion ( dumber, idiotic and the other tooks you use to try and difuse my statements ) ... i give my opinion .. i do not quote then attack the poster ... you need to learn civility"
That's fine you hate SOE, but don't lie about this. I remember you calling me a "retarded fanboi" because you didn't agree with what I said, with zero pesonal attacks from me. So seems you do "quote then attack the poster"
And we get it, you hate SOE. You don't need to resay everything about them in every post. You always mention SWG over and over, the same post 100 times over.
Please discuss the GAME. Made by SIGIL. I've seen maybe 2 posts from you discussing the GAME. Every other one is a big SOE hatefest.
please stay on topic
( this is for the last few posters )
i have to state, if true, from what Gres. & Natt. linked my thanks for the information. i think it's good when concerning a subject to have the agreeing & disagreeing.
As i said in the intial posting, whereas Vanguard was the next grand MMO i was hoping for now i'm reconsidering b/c of the SOE connection. i'm just trying to project long term of how Vanguard will be handled which EQ is the example to figure it out from.
i have little doubt that Vanguard will reach a deserving level of success. But nonetheless this is maybe beginning another pattern which i don't hope for, probably not but maybe. It's promising to hear Sigil is thinking-up other games as well, but also a bit surprising how sudden the Microsoft exit & SOE entrance was too.
Does seem there's a lot of comments that Vanguard will suck now b/c of the SOE connection which is for sure not true. As false though is that same adamant belief that b/c of the SOE connection to Vanguard this game will be better. Vanguard will either be liked or disliked for various reasons by numerous players/customers. The SOE connection is just one factor. We should all be patient & judge Vanguard based on all it's merits.
Either way, if i decide to play Vanguard i know i'll need a new computer. Overall, i still think this is a bad indicator so far about the direction but in the long run for the wellfare of Vanguard it might be better off. Lots of tactics have to be considered i'm sure when involving this process.
These forums are going to be pretty confusing if everyone goes back and shows year old posts that basically say "I told you so".
another smart post from a long time ago ... warning people as to the future ...
These forums are going to be pretty confusing if everyone goes back and shows year old posts that basically say "I told you so".ya but it gives me closure and satisfaction to the issue ...
. when i was here a year ago explaining how bascially everything which HAS happened would happen ... explaining in detail how it would unfold ... and having people totally shoot my posts down and accuse me of trolling and flaming .. when all i was doing was trying to HELP them by warning them .... ( btw i lost my original mmorpg account because of people from the vanguard boards reporting me when i was informing them brad and company had plans to sell the game to SOE in a year ( that post is long gone))
kind of sets the record straight as to my intentions ...maybe next time .. gamers will trust fellow GAMERS ... instead of stupid CEO's who will lie and cheat for that bottom dollar
gamers do listen to other gamers. fanbois don't.
could we please get correspondent writers and moderators, on the eve forum at mmorpg.com, who are well-versed on eve-online and aren't just passersby pushing buttons? pretty please?