SOE Learns Jiu-Jitsu

Posted on June 11, 2007 by Scott Jennings| 18 Comments

When a giant is stomping in the playground, what do you do? Move playgrounds, duh.

The problem is that the company’s first huge hit — EverQuest, released in 1999 — remains its only genuine blockbuster, with around 250,000 users. (The company used to report subscriber figures, but stopped a few years ago.) A competing online game, World of Warcraft, made by Blizzard Entertainment, of Irvine, Calif., has, meanwhile, practically reshaped the game industry by attracting an enormous eight million paying users around the world.

So today, Sony Online intends to unveil its plan to retake leadership in online gaming by unveiling three new games in development. More broadly, the new games represent an attempt to broaden the company in four major ways: diversifying its business model, expanding the demographic profile of its customer base, moving into the console market in addition to making games for PCs and increasing its presence in Asia.

SOE is planning to do this via remembering that humanity actually has two genders.

To reach out to girls, Mr. Smedley realized he had to hire more women. The creative director and art director on the game are now women.

“I just can’t explain to a 30-year-old single male why 10-year-old girls like horses,” he said. “We were trying to figure out what pets to put into Free Realms and before, the lead designer was a guy and he definitely wanted things that could fight. And when we got more women on the team, it was like ‘No, no, no. We need puppies and horses in there.’ ”

Everybody likes puppies.

Reaction in the usual quarters is expected: “Why are you not making WoW again? Make WoW again! We like WoW!” Personally I think it’s a smart move. If you want to diversify the market, you should, you know, make a game that appeals to, you know, a different market. Kinda simple stuff!

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  • Riprend

    This is a sea change some time in the making. We’ve been seeing more and more attention paid to the vasty deep of money female gamers are bringing in, especially to Pogo whose owners are not only wearing money hats but probably using money rubbers with sex dolls made of money.

    I’m not so certain about microtransactions. I’ve done it some before, but I never end up spending as much money as I would with a subscription… but I know there are some places that do bonzer with it, so I suppose I’m not the norm. I do think there’s a higher comfort level with microtransactions, which may get you more casual players. The ideal, I think, is to do exactly what Pogo’s done – set your subscription at like $5/month, and do the micros. Psychologically, $5 or $6 a month feels like much less even than $7 or $8, and definitely $15.

    -Rip

  • Mist

    I can’t even fathom why they want to move away from subscriptions. They seem like an excellent source of value for the consumer, and a steady, moderately high level of very easily predictable income for the owner of the game.

  • Naladini

    Who said they’re moving away from subscriptions? I believe their goal is to increase revenue from other sources so that subscriptions continue to exist, and possibly grow, but do not remain a staggeringly high percentage of their income.

  • MissFruityPie

    I’ve known about Free Realms for a while now. I’m very excited to see how it turns out, and I hope it does well. They’ll be competing against games like Runescape, Maple Story, FLYFF, and (soon) Earth Eternal. My suspicion is that the customer base for those games doesn’t have a heck of a lot of crossover with the group of folks who play standard subscription-based MMOs today, so if this does well, it can only spell more money for SOE, and frankly — I think they deserve more success than they’ve had in recent years. They’ve cleaned up their act a great deal.

  • http://www.beafraid.com Hellfire

    Girls love horses, therefore if our game has horses girls will love it!

    Grats, Smed. Welcome to 1973. I’d be shocked and either the new art or creative directors aren’t named sugartits. Or at least CALLED sugartits by their staff. I have no problem with the hiring, just the pretense. There are a lot of very talented women in the world, it’s shocking that a decade after development of Everquest they’re just now finding two that are qualified to hold director-level positions.

    Honest question time for those of you who may actually know – are there truly no women qualified to be an executive producer, lead designer or other “buck stops here” position that doesn’t involve doodling hearts and pictures of Justin Timberlake on My Little Pony notebooks? I have nothing but respect for artists, silly rhetoric aside, but the art director doesn’t decide if there’s XP loss, corpse looting or PvP.

  • Scott Jennings

    If I have her current role correct, the current lead designer on DAOC is female, and no one ever calls her “sugartits”.

  • Darniaq

    I’m actually a bit surprised by the sexist comment about girls and horses too, but I can’t say it’s wrong given the state of the industry. Just odd from someone who’s usually a lot more PC than that.

    In any case, this is a smart move from SOE, though not surprising. It’s just that their comparisons are to games who have enjoyed the vast majority of their success in markets other than the one in which SOE has.

    Browser-based (or browserless-but-streamed-content) is one of the big futures for the genre. People like thinking WoW made things mainstream. I don’t think it did. It just invited a few more million Achiever-archetypes into the fold than previously believed to exist.

    TRULY bigtime is measured in the numbers Habbo, Maplestory, Audition, Krazykart and a couple of others have, *multiples* of WoW. At the same time, those are numbers these types of games need because a far less percentage of the active players (itself a far less percentage of the advertised numbers) are the ones doing most of the funding. At the same time to THAT of course is the far lower cost to MAKE these types of games.

    Very few can spend scores of millions on a game before it launches. And the emerging demographics that enjoy the games that didn’t do this prove there’s a lot more potential there than in DIKU #24.

  • Aufero

    This appears to be the direction Raph has been saying MMO companies need to be heading ever since he left SOE. Wonder if SOE only now started listening, or if it just took a year of bureaucratic lead time to set in?

  • Simond

    Does this mean that we’re finally going to get our ponies?

  • Reg

    I don’t have to be a girl to get my pony do I?

  • Baldrake

    TFA said: “Sony Online, however, has had practically no presence in Asia, primarily because EverQuest just does not appeal to Asian gaming tastes.”

    Is this true? Is this just a question of art style or is there really something about EQ that is different enough from, say, WoW or UO or DAoC that it doesn’t appeal to Asians?

  • Jessica Mulligan

    EQ: There are several reasons why neither EQ or EQII took off in Asia: the technology requirements on launch were so high that it limited the number of home and internet cafes that could actually run it, the cultural localization done by the local subsidiary was pretty poor, there wasn’t enough emphasis on PvP (which is big in Asia for traditional MMOs), among others. SOE also chose the wrong company in Taiwan to partner with for EQII, making them something of a laughingstock in the community before the game even launched.

    That doesn’t mean SOE hasn’t learned some lessons; they obviously have, hence the new strategy. It *is* smart; you don’t butt your head against the WoW wall, you find a new playground.

    Women Leads: There are more than one in the industry, you just rarely hear about them. Until recently, the Live Team Producer on EQII was a woman (who also happened to be my live team producer and lead engineer on AC1, back in the day). The Executive Producer on DnD Online was a woman, as well. In the broader industry, Lucy Bradshaw at Maxis ran the Sims franchise forever.

    So, they exist; you just never hear about them because the companies are run by men who like the ego stroke of giving interviews about how they grok the woman gamer.

    Browser-based: Darniaq may right for the long run, but the markets the games serve are different. The Habbos and Krazy Karts serve a more mass-market audience, from whom it is much harder to get money. The revenue shows it: for example, look at Habbo’s revenue last year versus WoW’s, around $80 million US vs. something north of $600 million US. For that matter, with less than 1/10th of the users of Habbo, SOE as a whole did double the revenue of Habbo. The challenge in broadening your user base is in also finding a way to “monetize” them.

    Not that I’d sneer at $80m USD annually, :D .

  • http://www.thisisnotacommunity.org D-0ne

    This is SOE under discussion here… The best analogy is a drunk at the bar, hammered to no end, proclaiming he’s never going to drink again.

    The day SOE stops looking at customers as the enemy of the state or as allies in the war on malcontent paying customers, as con men and marks, as a credit card number, as whiny cry babies, as idiots that don’t deserve to be treated with any respect at all, as the butt of all inside jokes, will be the day they have a chance at recovery. Until then, they’re just hoping things will get better and not addressing the real problems they have.

    SOE biggest problem is their core belief that the customer is always wrong.

  • http://www.plutospage.com/wow/ yunk

    Hey, Ford deliberately marketed the Mustang to females, and used focus groups of women for research in the 90s, and sales stayed strong among both men and women, while Camaro sales crumpled.

    Hey wait a minute … Mustang.. Pony.. I’m seeing a connection here.

  • Nicademus

    Why can’t you have puppies and ponies that fight each other?

    C’mon PKing your opponent via flying puppy bionic attack would be pretty damn sweet, admit it.

  • Aufero

    Better yet, exploding bionic puppies. For the swarm!

  • http://www.lietcam.com Sara Jensen

    Pssh. Everyone knows you can’t balance puppies and horses. The horses will always win. Unless they’re all bionic and shit, like Nic said, but then it’d be sci fi, and we know women don’t like sci fi!

    To add to the female leads list, I believe Eri Izawa was an early live lead designer on AC1. I was the live lead designer on Shadowbane for a couple of years as well.

  • Artheos

    I read the plans, and thought ‘meh’. But then I’m not in any of their target markets.

    One thing though, it will be incredibly unlikely for me to play any game that replaces steady, predictable subscription fees with microtransactions.

    /shrug