Future Sony MMOs Will Be On Consoles

The MTV Multiplayer Blog interviewed John Smedley, President of Sony Online Entertainment, about the future of MMOs. He discusses some of SOE's current projects and comments that they'll be focusing on consoles for all of their upcoming MMOs. "I would say that we would be one of the early adopters on [bringing MMOs to consoles], and we plan on becoming one of the dominant players in the MMO space on consoles." Sony's plans may include games for their hand-held console, the PSP. Smedley goes on to talk about bringing existing, popular franchises into MMO development, and remarks, "It's pretty safe to say that 'EverQuest' has not seen its last game."

Comments

Everquest 3?

[Anonymous Coward]

I worry though about console MMOs. MMOs focus a lot on communication between people for grouping/raiding. Unless the console this is being written for supports headsets for a Teamspeak-like interface, communicating on a raid will be very difficult, especially with a game controller.

EQOA is a good MMO, but its almost empty of population.

Maybe the best compromise would be allowing both PCs and PS/3s to both play.

Console MMO = good times for 14 year olds

[Grendel_Prime]

Consoles appeal to:

1.) "Hardcore" gamers -- primarily 14 year old homophobic racists
2.) Adult gamers -- 30-something PS3 owners who play after work and on weekends
3.) "Casual" gamers -- mainly Wiinies, young kids, women, senior citizens

Out of these, the only ones serious enough about gaming to put the time and energy into grinding would be the "hardcore" gamers. Great just what we need, MORE unsupervised kids running around in a persistent virtual environment yelling racial homophobic epithets while teabagging every other player they just teamkilled on a quest. This should make Sony lots of money!

Yet another sign of just how out-of-touch Sony is with its consumers.

Re:Console controllers for long-term playing?

[MBGMorden]

As another user already pointed out: consoles today are often connected to HDTV's that rival computer monitors in display resolution. Most have hard drives. If you add a keyboard and mouse, and the ability to check email, surf the web, etc, then the whole idea of a "console" is gone. It's just become another PC platform that happens to have good game support.