SOE Gamer Day: The Business Goes Global
SOE looked to the future at an event this week in New York and WarCry was there. Dana Massey reports on where the business is going and gives an overview of where its at in the first of several articles from that event.
SOE Gamer Day New York: The Business
Article by Dana Massey
On Thursday, WarCry attended SOE's East Coast Gamers' Day in New York. This event was a chance for SOE to outline their strategic vision for the future, unveil some new games and show off what they already have. Over the next little while, we'll bring you a series of articles from this event. Most look at the games, but this first one, looks at SOE as a whole.
SOE Director of Corporate Communications Courtney Simmons billed the event as a presentation of their "roadmap to the future." They're now a company with six studios (San Diego, Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle, Austin and Taiwan), over 700 employees and their hands in a range of pots. They're not just doing MMOs these days. They do single player games, Playstation 3 titles and card games. They're also broadening their focus and turning an eye towards Asia. Their SOGA studio in Taiwan represents a new frontier for this previously North American-focused wing of the Japanese giants. Through all this, they also hope to work more closely with their corporate parents, Sony.
COO Russell Shanks summed up the focus of SOE in three words: "diversifying, globalizing, hiring." These echoed Simmons' statements and also hinted at the larger theme. SOE is a company that wants to bring MMOs to the mainstream in a way no one has yet to accomplish.
Already famous for their Station Pass, which gives gamers access to all the SOE games for one fee, they're going to take it to the next step with the Station Launcher. This is a single program used to run all of their content. It includes things like incremental, background patching so that players can play their games and not wait for big downloads. They're also jumping on the social networking bandwagon. The Launcher includes integrated chat that lets people talk with people on popular instant messangers and cross-game friend tracking so that if your hunting partner jumps from Planetside to Vanguard, you guys can stay in touch.
They're hoping to take it even further than that. Shanks explored the idea of media content, such as the ability for a few people to watch a movie, bought from the system, and through integrated voice chat technology, enjoy it at the same time and hear each other's snide remarks. Probably not a feature that's very good for those who shush people during movies, but for the smartasses out there, a dream come true.
A little known part of SOE's empire is their work on the online components of the Playstation 3. They run Sony's online answer to the Xbox Live and have made and launched six games, five of them at their San Diego offices. Most recently, they confirmed that their latest title, an update of the classic Rampart, is about to hit the download service. Shanks noted that their games have been downloaded over 300,000 times already and that they're quite pleased.
They followed with a talk from the heads of each studio about what each one was up to. The HQ in San Diego talked about their PS3 titles and each of the MMOs they're responsible for. We'll have individual articles on each of these. Denver followed with a presentation on their online tradable card games, including the recently launched Stargate TCG that hit both stores (physically) and the web (digitally) at the same time.
SOE Los Angeles is a newer division of SOE, previously part of Sony, that concentrates on mobile phone games. Largely, they have a lot of movie-tie in titles, such as Spider-man 3, but they also showed off a likely unintentionally hilarious demo of Snoop Dogg's Cruisin', a game where players must use the hydraulics in their car to impress the legendary rapper. As funny as it was unexpected, the dynamics still looked good, reminiscent of similar mini-games in titles like Grand Theft Auto III. They were also very excited about their original God of War game, also for mobile phones. Calling it the best work they've done, they showed off a game - with an original story by the same creative minds behind the console versions - of this side-scrolling action game. It looked like a blast, but well beyond my cell phone's capabilities.
The guys from Taiwan got up next to introduce Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle MMORPG for the Asian market. This is a side-view martial arts combat MMO. In style, it is like Mortal Kombat or other classics of the fighting genre, but it's an MMO and updated for 2007. It's still early, but SOGA is planning to release it in Asia with a hybrid model that covers micropayments and subscriptions. Interestingly though, they did explain that while players could play for free for a limited number of fights each day, they hoped to make it so that if player win, they earn more free lives.
SOE Austin's John Blakely got up to talk about their ongoing work to "reinvigorate" Star Wars Galaxies and not talk about the other thing they're working on that may or may not be DC Universe Online. They skirted the comic-book IP and stuck to Galaxies there on out. Blakely highlighted the Beast Master and storyteller modes that are coming into the title. He also explained that part of the reason for the changes to SWG was to dial it back to a core of fun classes, representative of the films and then expand outward from there when they know they're doing something right.
SOE Seattle went last to talk about how they've taken on running the day-to-day operation of The Matrix Online and some other stuff.
The crown jewels of this event were two new IPs the company unveiled, but unfortunately, we're sworn to secrecy on those for another few weeks. After the initial presentations, we split off into demo stations and were able to talk one on one with representatives of various games. Over the next few days, we'll bring you updates on Gods and Heroes, EverQuest II, EverQuest, the Station Launcher and a final article that deals with the gamut of other titles they had on display. Finally, next month, we'll take a look at the two new, super-secret IPs.
What do you have to say about this article? Let us know in the comment thread.
Permalink
SOE Gamer Day: The Business Goes Global
SOE looked to the future at an event this week in New York and WarCry was there. Dana Massey reports on where the business is going and gives an overview of where its at in the first of several articles from that event.
Article by Dana Massey
On Thursday, WarCry attended SOE's East Coast Gamers' Day in New York. This event was a chance for SOE to outline their strategic vision for the future, unveil some new games and show off what they already have. Over the next little while, we'll bring you a series of articles from this event. Most look at the games, but this first one, looks at SOE as a whole.
SOE Director of Corporate Communications Courtney Simmons billed the event as a presentation of their "roadmap to the future." They're now a company with six studios (San Diego, Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle, Austin and Taiwan), over 700 employees and their hands in a range of pots. They're not just doing MMOs these days. They do single player games, Playstation 3 titles and card games. They're also broadening their focus and turning an eye towards Asia. Their SOGA studio in Taiwan represents a new frontier for this previously North American-focused wing of the Japanese giants. Through all this, they also hope to work more closely with their corporate parents, Sony.
COO Russell Shanks summed up the focus of SOE in three words: "diversifying, globalizing, hiring." These echoed Simmons' statements and also hinted at the larger theme. SOE is a company that wants to bring MMOs to the mainstream in a way no one has yet to accomplish.
Already famous for their Station Pass, which gives gamers access to all the SOE games for one fee, they're going to take it to the next step with the Station Launcher. This is a single program used to run all of their content. It includes things like incremental, background patching so that players can play their games and not wait for big downloads. They're also jumping on the social networking bandwagon. The Launcher includes integrated chat that lets people talk with people on popular instant messangers and cross-game friend tracking so that if your hunting partner jumps from Planetside to Vanguard, you guys can stay in touch.
They're hoping to take it even further than that. Shanks explored the idea of media content, such as the ability for a few people to watch a movie, bought from the system, and through integrated voice chat technology, enjoy it at the same time and hear each other's snide remarks. Probably not a feature that's very good for those who shush people during movies, but for the smartasses out there, a dream come true.
A little known part of SOE's empire is their work on the online components of the Playstation 3. They run Sony's online answer to the Xbox Live and have made and launched six games, five of them at their San Diego offices. Most recently, they confirmed that their latest title, an update of the classic Rampart, is about to hit the download service. Shanks noted that their games have been downloaded over 300,000 times already and that they're quite pleased.
They followed with a talk from the heads of each studio about what each one was up to. The HQ in San Diego talked about their PS3 titles and each of the MMOs they're responsible for. We'll have individual articles on each of these. Denver followed with a presentation on their online tradable card games, including the recently launched Stargate TCG that hit both stores (physically) and the web (digitally) at the same time.
SOE Los Angeles is a newer division of SOE, previously part of Sony, that concentrates on mobile phone games. Largely, they have a lot of movie-tie in titles, such as Spider-man 3, but they also showed off a likely unintentionally hilarious demo of Snoop Dogg's Cruisin', a game where players must use the hydraulics in their car to impress the legendary rapper. As funny as it was unexpected, the dynamics still looked good, reminiscent of similar mini-games in titles like Grand Theft Auto III. They were also very excited about their original God of War game, also for mobile phones. Calling it the best work they've done, they showed off a game - with an original story by the same creative minds behind the console versions - of this side-scrolling action game. It looked like a blast, but well beyond my cell phone's capabilities.
The guys from Taiwan got up next to introduce Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle MMORPG for the Asian market. This is a side-view martial arts combat MMO. In style, it is like Mortal Kombat or other classics of the fighting genre, but it's an MMO and updated for 2007. It's still early, but SOGA is planning to release it in Asia with a hybrid model that covers micropayments and subscriptions. Interestingly though, they did explain that while players could play for free for a limited number of fights each day, they hoped to make it so that if player win, they earn more free lives.
SOE Austin's John Blakely got up to talk about their ongoing work to "reinvigorate" Star Wars Galaxies and not talk about the other thing they're working on that may or may not be DC Universe Online. They skirted the comic-book IP and stuck to Galaxies there on out. Blakely highlighted the Beast Master and storyteller modes that are coming into the title. He also explained that part of the reason for the changes to SWG was to dial it back to a core of fun classes, representative of the films and then expand outward from there when they know they're doing something right.
SOE Seattle went last to talk about how they've taken on running the day-to-day operation of The Matrix Online and some other stuff.
The crown jewels of this event were two new IPs the company unveiled, but unfortunately, we're sworn to secrecy on those for another few weeks. After the initial presentations, we split off into demo stations and were able to talk one on one with representatives of various games. Over the next few days, we'll bring you updates on Gods and Heroes, EverQuest II, EverQuest, the Station Launcher and a final article that deals with the gamut of other titles they had on display. Finally, next month, we'll take a look at the two new, super-secret IPs.
What do you have to say about this article? Let us know in the comment thread.
Permalink