Things continue to look grim for Sony and SOE.
Wow. The bad news just keeps rolling in. This was reported on Gamasutra:
Sony Online Entertainment Lays Off 41
This is after they recently reported losses of over a billion dollars (Sony, not SOE specifically), and the CEO of Activision threatening to stop making games for the PS3 if they don’t cut prices.
EQ2 struggles to maintain a userbase, SWG has to be feeling the pinch from SW: Old Republic, and the initial hype and excitement about Free Realms has died off fast.
What do you think of SOE’s current stable of games? What do you think is going to happen with them in the near future. Does SOE have anything positive lurking over the horizon? Can Free Realms save SOE?
DC Universe Online has the potential to be good. Of course, they are guaranteed to screw it up. They are including some notable features that Champions Online should include, but isn’t for some foolish reason. Eg, running up walls, hero vs villain pvp, etc. Problem is though, they are making it into another raid/loot game. When is the last time you saw Superman pick up a sword and start hacking people up with it? Loot makes no sense in a superhero game, unless you go to great lengths to reflavor it(like CoH did). As far as I know, Sony has no intention of doing so.
Maybe I should look into it again to see if they’ve come to their senses yet. Last time I looked into the it though, the offical site for the game was a freaking -MYSPACE- page. There’s no way I’m going on myspace to learn about a game.
Champions Online ruined itself by going with the combination subscription + microtransactions. Regular readers know I am a big fan of the freemium/mictotransaction system. But to combine it with subscriptions is just lame double dipping. It totally destroys the whole benefit of a microtransaction game – the fact that you don’t have the inexorable ding of that subscription hitting you every 30 days whether you are playing or not.