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Sony Sells Off Sony Online Entertainment

Posted by samzenpus on from the circle-of-business dept.

donniebaseball23 writes Sony Online Entertainment is to become Daybreak Game Company and turn its focus to multi-platform gaming. The company has been acquired by Columbus Nova and is now an indie studio. "We will continue to focus on delivering exceptional games to players around the world, as well as bringing our portfolio to new platforms, fully embracing the multi-platform world in which we all live," said Daybreak president John Smedley. But why did Sony shed SOE? Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter believes an online gaming company "isn't a great fit, particularly as games are shifting increasingly to a free-to-play mobile model."

10 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. The Zynga business model by Orion+Blastar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Make social network and mobile games that are free to play but require you to buy in-game items in order to complete quests and become better.

    Make sure you copy the ideas of other game companies.

    When the game isn't doing too well, move it to the location in India and let the India division support it until it dies off and has an end of life.

    Hire and fire developers all willy nilly, to save on research costs.

    Release the first version all buggy so that people have to buy the DLC that changes the game and fixes the bugs for more money.

    --
    Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
  2. free-to-pay model by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seriously, fuck the 'free-to-play/pay mobile model.' It has ruined gaming. Even better is when you find you paid for a game and the fucking thing is STILL free-to-pay if you intend on having a chance to win.

    1. Re:free-to-pay model by mlts · · Score: 2

      This is exactly what is killing the app model. Once IAP became standard, almost all games went from decent standalone apps with a reasonable difficulty level to ratty treadmills designed to stymie, obstruct, and frustrate the user so they would pay for more brains/smurfberries/tokens/simoleans/whatever to just clear that one hurdle... only to run into another one shortly after.

      Even the old tower defense games had their difficulty changed from doable to impossible unless one spent cash for additional points. Expansion content like towers or levels is understandable, but having to spend cash -per play- is something I'd do at an arcade, but not on my phone.

    2. Re:free-to-pay model by _xeno_ · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The thing is, we (OK, so not all of us, but the population at large) did that to ourselves. People just don't want to pay for games any more. Instead they'll go for the "free" game and play that instead of the paid game.

      What was the last truly successful MMO that required a subscription? We all know the answer: World of Warcraft. Nothing has come close to it since then. People just don't want to pay for their games. So to remain alive, the competitors go free to play. But they still need to pay for servers and developers and recoup their costs. So what do they do? They go free-to-play, but then to ensure that there's a reason for people to give them money, they go pay-to-win.

      And people pay! That's the issue, people pay them. I think it turns out that the majority of players playing these games don't pay any money. Instead, some fraction of players (the whales) spend thousands of dollars to win. And it's these whales that the companies care about, not the gamers that just want a fun game to play.

      It'd be nice to just blame the "whales" but - ultimately, it's not their fault. Because they're willing to crack open their wallet and pay for their entertainment. The problem is the huge number of gamers that aren't willing to shell out even $5 for a mobile game and instead go after the "free" games. Video game development still costs money, so publishers have to find some way to get money - so they go with pay to win.

      Because that's where the money is. The market has spoken, and the market is us. Gamasutra was right, gamers really are dead.

      --
      You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
  3. Re:Everquest by mlts · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yep, every year or so, it gets an expansion. The engine is dated, but it has the most content of any MMO out there just due to its age. The old quests are still there, but the game has moved to missions. The grinding is somewhat present, but with missions, one does level up decently quickly. If you die, summon your corpse to the guild lobby, have your merc res you, then go back swinging.

    There is an "EQ3" in the works, or Everquest Next. It is interesting how that develops over time with the press releases, and it appears the devs are doing it right, and will release when it is ready, and no earlier.

  4. Likely for the best, quoted "analyst" is dumb by jacks+smirking+reven · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This isn't about Sony jumping in with F2P, it's about the high cost of developing MMO games. When a game costs north of $100,000,000 to develop as well as the high number of servers and support staff you need to be able to reach as many gamers as possible. Being restricted to Sony/PC platform still leaves out the XBox audience (while smaller than PS4/PC it's still a large enough chunk to not ignore) and being under Sony's control means cross-platform is something of a conflict of interest.

    Sony will still be more than amicable with having the new studios games on it's hardware it just gives the developers more flexibility. Sony still collects it's license fees by the game being on PS4 and they'd rather collect those fees (the bread and butter of consoles) and not be responsible for the day-to-day operations, which will likely operate better as an entity who does and only does MMO as opposed to cog in a huge corporate umbrella.

    1. Re:Likely for the best, quoted "analyst" is dumb by halofan_sd · · Score: 2, Informative

      no it's about Sony having to sell assets, they have been selling buildings, now selling other assets. last fiscal year they have a net loss of $2.15 billion

  5. We have different definition of indie... by aepervius · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you get acquired by somebody, like say, colombus nova, and work under them, you are not an independent studio anymore.

    --
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    visit randi.org
  6. Re:Everquest by Ranbot · · Score: 3, Informative

    You should check EVE online if you want brutal mechanics :P

    Or you could get the same effect by balancing your checkbook in MS Excel in front of a background of stars. The brutality of gameplay depends your personal finances.

  7. Sony is hemorrhaging by vix86 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Regardless of what any of the articles say about the decision to do this, I personally believe the reason behind this is because Sony is bleeding money left and right. Sony has been selling off parts of their company for the past year now. It's no secret, Sony has been sinking slowly. They sold their mobile division, they sold their Vaio division, and probably came pretty close to selling their TV division as well, before thinking better of it and simply split it off into a new company. Now they are selling one of their big game studios. If Sony can't find a new market to be successful in, then I wouldn't be surprised to hear about Sony being bought by another company here in the next 3-5 years.