Sony Sells Off Sony Online Entertainment

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."

Comments

The Zynga business model

[Orion Blastar]

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.

free-to-pay model

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Everquest

[mlts]

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.

Likely for the best, quoted "analyst" is dumb

[jacks smirking reven]

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.

We have different definition of indie...

[aepervius]

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