Nothing really new. Just two posts from Raph explaining things I was already aware of. But I thought it was a good thing to archive them. And, oh! Even that post on Terra Nova.

If I’m being silent it’s because I’m writing too much on the forums. I’m going to archive some stuff and the site risks to get swamped with too much reasonings all at once.

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Raph:
I officially moved out of the Creative Director role in July of that year (which was literally a couple of days after launch; some think that I got the job post-SWG, but in fact, I was offered it months before and chose not to take it until SWG had launched). I was still involved, to a gradually lessening degree, until Sept or so. So I was involved in planning mounts, vehicles, and cities, and I was involved in the Warren. By the time Holocron drops for Jedi came out, I was not actively on the team. What’s more, I have been at arm’s length to the title ever since, because to do otherwise would be very disruptive to the guys who have charge of it now.

As far as your question, I of course have to be politic about answering it, but I’d answer with “we did add content” — cf the aforementioned Warren — and “content depends on systems being solid underneath” — such as better content tools, which we now have, and such as fixing the bugs you cited.

It’s not really a complicated answer…

Raph:
NC has publishing deals with Cryptic, ArenaNet, and NetDevil. I think in some cases of new studios they have funded they have equity too (there’s that ex-Blizz one?). Internally, they develop Tabula Rasa. Lastly, they run US ops for the Korean games they have brought over.

So Cryptic et al are seperate companies.

SOE is a division of a division of a division of Sony, of course. It has very few straight publishing deals (mostly for PSP games — GripShift and Frantix). It has distribution deals (which are not full publishing, just “get the box onto shelves” deals) like the AC deal and the Toontown deal. It has externally developed titles like Champions of Norrath — this is sort of like a commissioned title. Lastly, it has internal development, at three separate studios: Austin, SD, Seattle.

There are centralized things: network ops, customer service, QA (although there is some QA at each location, because you do need some on the ground, so to speak), marketing, and so on. Billing is of course centralized. There’s also a suite of common technologies that we use so that games can interoperate: chat, networking, hooks so that ops can monitor server status, etc. By and large though, each team runs their own live business under a degree of central supervision.

Raph:
The metric I’ve found most useful for population size is weekly uniques. You can also then compare this to your paying (or “can log in”, which we call “entitled”) userbase to arrive at a uniques percentage. Different games will have a different uniques percentage, but higher is better.

Concurrent users is useless. The old metric of “multiply peak concurrent by 4-5” has proven not to hold true for many different game styles. Among the casual Korean games, I am told they regularly multiply by 10. SWG, pre CU and NGE, you had to multiply by 8; Planetside was similar. Different game playstyles lead to different play session lengths, which then affects concurrency.