CBS News Fields SWG Hatemail

Back in December of last year, the CBS News site did a feature printing some of the frustrated and confused emails sent by Star Wars Galaxies players. These individuals were all upset by the 'NGE', or New Game Enhancements, patched into the game by publisher Sony Online Entertainment. Evidently the feature was so popular they've gone back into the well, printing up a whole new batch of SWG-related frustrations. When CBS and the Washington Post are covering something like this, it tells me two things. First, MMOGs are definitely mainstream now. Second, Sony made a mistake. Warcry has some information that may reveal how big a mistake. They claim that a packet sniffer built into the SWG client made population numbers for the servers available to players. On a Friday night, at peak time, post-NGE Galaxies is apparently only drawing 10,400 players across all galaxy servers. This is basically 'some guy on a website' talk, so take this with a big grain of salt. It's sobering news, though, if true.

Comments

CBS gets SWG hatemail?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

FYI, IANAG but FWIW I think that CBS, in addition to NBC, WB, ABC, CNN, and TBS and the CBC ought to provide TMI rather than too little regarding MMOG, especially SWG and (OMG) NGE! I take issue, though, with TFA in that I don't think that it's such a BD when CBS and the WP are covering this. MMOGs are still for DSHs living ITPBs.

10,400 is a lot of players. And I certainly wouldn't want my packets sniffed. But, WTF? It's not like it's BB watching you, just a bunch of other DSHs ITPBs.

OMGWTFBBQLOL!

No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS

[Moraelin]

To put things into perspective, EA considered TSO a _flop_ when it stabilized at 100,000 subscribers. So 10,000 active subscribers is just dead. There were a couple of MUDs in the 90s which could boast more players than that.

Even if it were 150,000 USD at month, that just doesn't pay for the server costs, admin salaries, GM salaries (someone still has to make sure those 10,000 don't rampantly cheat), patching (if they do cheat, someone has to fix the bugs), QA (ideally a patch would be tested before release), and further development. We're talking a major commercial game, not someone's web-based exercise where making any money in a month is still great.

But I'm guessing they don't even make 150,000 USD a month. Two words: "station pass". If you're already paying for a Sony game, you can get access to all others for half the price of a game. If you already play two EQ games (e.g., Planetside and EQ/EQ2), you get SWG for free. Heck, Sony even offers in-game advantages for for getting a station pass even for a single game, such as getting extra moves (directly or via bundled mini-expansions), or extra character slots or whatever. So you could really play just one Sony game and incidentally get the others for free.

I know that first hand. The periods when I went back to SWG, only to find it a bigger mess and buggier to boot, were just that: I already had a station pass, SWG didn't cost anything extra (other than the download times for the patches) to try, so wth... sure, I'll give it another try.

So the question is how many of those 10,000 are just dropping by between rounds of their main SOE game (e.g., when their guildies aren't online in EQ), but don't actually pay a single buck to Sony for the privilege. It could be none, or it could be that SWG isn't actually making Sony _any_ income, or more probably somewhere in between.

Either way you want to slice it and look at it, it's a major fuck-up. Only 10k subscribers is MMO death anyway, but for a game based on the biggest franchise in history... there are no words to properly describe how big a fuck-up that is.

There were _millions_ of SW nerds who waited for SWG like it was the second coming of Obi Wa... err... the messiah. There were people who grew up with SW. People who put "Jedi" as their religion on census forms and _meant_ it. As Scott Kurtz aptly put it in a comic strip, there were people who said goodbye to their friends and family and never expected to leave the SW universe again. It was a franchise that made Warcraft or The Sims look like peanuts. (When was the last time you've heard someone debate Warcraft as passionately as "Han shot first"?)

And yet they fucked up. They were handed over the franchise and the fans on a silver platter, and they fucked up. There's no other way to put it.

Of course, I suspect that won't stop Raph Koster from giving even more interviews about how great a game designer he is, and spout various stuff like "a MMO doesn't have to be a good game, it's just a social framework" (then how come SWG never was much of either?) or "the biggest MMO success ever isn't WoW, it's Habbo Hotel." (Never mind that Habbo Hotel is a free game _and_ it still doesn't have the number of active subscribers that WoW has. We'll just redefine that as the new metric of success.) But I digress.