SOE's John Smedley weighs in on Gods and Heroes, lessons from Vanguard
Filed under: Gods and Heroes, Business models, MMO industry, Vanguard
GamesIndustry.biz continues its week of MMO-related features, discussing the role of partnerships in the business. Sony Online Entertainment has obviously had a number of notable relationships, and company president John Smedley offered up some time to comment on their history with business partnerships. As has often been the trend in recent years, Mr. Smedley talked heavily about the lessons the company has learned through hard knocks and rough launches. One of the reoccuring themes in GI's discussion with the CEO is what can be taken away from Vanguard's horrible launch early last year.Smedley makes no bones about that situation, saying that the company was being "run into the ground", but also noting that the game is now doing very well. He also spends some time talking about their relationship with Perpetual Entertainment and their stillborn collaboration Gods and Heroes. "Behind the scenes ... they were putting on a brave face to customers, but we were giving them advice all the time - which was ignored. At some point you get to this point in development ... in fact with Perpetual that was a direct result of the learnings we got from Vanguard - at one point they wanted to try and put the thing out early, and we said 'Look, we're not interested - we don't care if we lose money, but if you put this thing out there, users are going to hate it, and it's going to be a bad release.'" Also check out the interview for more on the in-development Indian title Ramayan, the changing MMO marketplace, and SOE's role in the future of the genre.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-06-2008 @ 5:03PM
Leshrac said...
I'll be honest up front; I'm not a Smedley fan. And that article did nothing to sway me either way. And he did know what the state of Vanguard was when it shipped, they were the publishers and Brad and Smedley were co-founders of Verant. He knew that Vanguard was in bad shape but they didn't want to put more money into the game.
Smedley is a leaf in the wind, he has no original ideas - he just imitates. They (SOE) haven't done anything innovative since EQ broke. They WoW'ified EQ2, the tried to WoW'ify SWG as well. He's a follower and not a leader, the best thing Sony could do would be to put someone in charge of SOE that is a ground-breaker and idea man, unlike Smedley who is nothing more then a corporate puppet because you're not going to topple WoW or gain WoW-like success imitating and copying.
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5-06-2008 @ 5:49PM
pufonthis said...
I don't know why but John Smedley always comes off as a clueless jerk.
He says that SOE constantly gave the Gods & Heroes team advice but they didn't listen. Well duh! Would you listen to John and SOE either? SOE comes in and sucks all the life and fun out of a game and then expects to be leaders in the MMO market. Get real.
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5-07-2008 @ 10:10AM
Buckeye said...
The man is beyond clueless and it baffles me as to why SOE keeps him around. Anyone that would take advice from John Smedley would be a fool.
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