Star Wars and Raph Leave SOE?

Gamespot reports that Raph Koster, chief creative officer for Sony Online Entertainment, has left the company. While Gamespot seems to confirm this news, there are a number of MMOG-related rumours swirling at GDC. Mythic may be in EA's sights for acquisition, and Sony Online may soon be losing the rights to the Star Wars license. IE: No more SWG. Grimwell online has a rundown on these virulent rumours. Chris Kramer (from SOE) said words to the effect of "We're in it together for the long haul." SWG will be staying with Sony Online for some time to come.

Comments

Maybe a purge is needed...

[Churla]

IMHO , SWG was doomed from the get go. The reason is that they had a great IP to develop a game off of. They had two options they could go for. Either make a game for star wars fans, or make a game for MMORPG players. They tried to straddle the fence and it cost them. The SW fans didn't feel that this game was any more SW than any other sci fi based MMORPG other than character references and some races. I mean really now, how many beast tamers did you see in the star wars movies? They got a similarly tepid response from MMORPG junkies because it really wasn't anything innovative to the genre and was cursed with some bottability issues. So they roll out NGE to try to fix this. Problem, the hardcore SW people have already left, and you remake the game to try to be more appeasing to what they're looking for. This annoys the MMORPG people because now it's even less of a game they can get into. In a perfect world it would have been "Hey, you got Star Wars in my MMORPG! No you got MMORPG in my Star Wars! Hey these are two great tastes that taste great together!!!" Instead we got "Hey, you got MMORPG in my star wars, and I seem to have gotten some Star wars in your MMORPG, how about we let this Sony person throw it on the ground and piss on it?"