Tag Archives: Tinfoil hats

Rumors of SOE / LucasArts Split Growing

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Posted by SirBruce. Copy/paste links for teh win:

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I’m not sure when this all started, but I remember first hearing some curious rumblings when LucasArts, not SOE, started recruiting for a new position as Senior Director of Star Wars Galaxies:

http://www.lucasarts.com/jobs/descriptions/?ID=director

After that, rumors started to percolate of an impending split between the two groups. Now that rumor has reached the Slashdot level:

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/10/187257&tid=127&tid=10

Essentially, the rumor is LucasArts doesn’t like what SOE is doing and SOE doesn’t like being hampered by LucasArts, and so after JTL goes live they’ll announced that LucasArts will be taking over complete operation and control of Star Wars Galaxies and will announce work on a second expansion.

If the rumors are true, then I think LucasArts doesn’t know what they are getting themselves into. SOE, for all its faults, has a lot of experience in this area. LucasArts has almost none. While LucasArts may indeed have better ideas for a future direction for the game, they are going to be completely unprepared to handle operation of this game. Expect deep hurting over the next 1-2 years if this comes to pass.

Bruce

Going nuts with numbers

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SirBruce is back from Austin Game Conference with an interesting report and more subscription numbers:

– Asheron Call 1 – 37,000
– Asheron Call 2 – 18,000
– Ultima Online – 165,000 – 170,000 (ahah!)
– Star Wars Galaxies – 250,000 – 300,000

As I commented I’m so glad about the numbers. Watching UO sinking down makes me feel optimist. AC1+2 together don’t even reach the numbers of Eve-Online and I still wonder why Turbine has still relevance on this genre considering those awful results. SWG is even more laughable. One of the conferences was “Designing Within a License” with Rich Vogel of SOE representing Star Wars. Yeah, with a result right above DAoC. Those peoples should learn, open their ears, not teach. And the fun isn’t over because the other two were Vijay Lakshman of Turbine representing D&D and Middle Earth, Chris McKibbin of Perpetual Entertainement representing the new Star Trek MMO.

The first from a game that has just begun the development, the second for a game that isn’t even on the paper.

The industry is surely in good hands.

Dragon Empires shitcanned

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Dragon Empires joins the unborn mmorpg category and is now officially cancelled.

As expected.
There are already two other projects that may close before the end of the year. Aside Horizon.

A good week for this genre, as Darniaq writes:
– World of Warcraft begins its most important week of the year aside release: the Stress Test (and it’s going well)
– Star Wars Galaxies launches the Jedi Patch (no comment)
– Ryzom open beta is supposed to start (who cares?)
– Anarchy Online launches an interesting expansion where for the first time are the players to be raided by mobs
– A Tale in the Desert concludes the beta and goes live
– And, obviously, Dragon Empires is now cancelled

And, yes, I consider Daragon Empire’s shutdown a good news since it was only a matter of time. Better soon than later.

I leave to you the search for the links to what interests you.