SOE Unveils In-Game EverQuest TCG 55
Sony Online Entertainment this week stated they'd have a 'new announcement' on Friday at their annual Fan Faire player event. SOE President John Smedley addressed the assembled players, revealing an in-game trading card game that's to be rolled out to players of EverQuest and EverQuest 2 sometime before the end of the month. The game was developed by the SOE-Denver studio, the same folks who made online TCGs out of Pirates! and Stargate. Gamespot reports: "All current EQ and EQ2 players will initially receive a starter deck, and additional booster packs can be purchased with real-world cash. However, those wishing not to spend any extra money will be happy to know that booster packs can also be acquired as loot off of boss mobs in both games, and the game will be free of charge to play. Of further note, the game will feature loot cards that can be redeemed for in-game items for players' characters. SOE plans to offer substantial support for the product, including in-game tournaments, card trading, a unique user interface, and deck-building functionality."
Actually, that's the whole problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it does need more players. Badly. And, no, not enough people play it. World Of Warcraft is currently at around 20 times more subscribers than EQ1 at its peak, and rising. (Whereas by definition EQ1 went downwards after the peak.) And EQ2 actually peaked lower than EQ1, and even giving away the base game didn't save it.
EQ2 actually had to merge pairs of servers into a single server pretty quickly, because the populations on each was ridiculously low. It was starting to get the reputation of being, I quote loosely from memory, "like Morrowind, except you occasionally see another player." Of course, Sony's PR hacks worded it like it was some great innovation to improve gameplay experience... which technically it was, but only because it reduced a _problem_ they were having.
Add the fact that WoW subscriptions are slightly more expensive, and you're looking at Blizzard making some 25 times more money than EQ1 at its peak. And, you know, EQ1 used to be called a money printing license.
Add to that a bit of hubris too. Sony used to own the MMO market, and now they went to being an also-ran, fighting to keep a single-digit market share percentage. I'm betting that a lot of people at Sony took that as an insult.
From a more pragmatic thing, there's the image and word-of-mouth factor too. At one point Sony used to be _the_ name in MMOs and EQ was almost a synonim for MMOs. Anyone you knew who was playing an MMO, chances are they played EQ. That's free marketting. Nowadays, if you think "MMO", you think "WoW". And if you hear of someone who plays any Sony MMO, you don't ask, "how much does it cost?", you ask, "why?" (Planetside almost bombed, Matrix Online was a major dud, EQ2 we already discussed, and SWG managed to allienate even its die-hard fanboys without bringing any new customers in the process.)
Heck, even if you talk to someone who's sick and tired of WoW, chances are they won't say, "I'm gonna try EQ2 then", they'll say something like, "I'm gonna try LOTRO, 'cause it's like WoW with a Tolkien theme."
Add to that the awful lot of bad PR that Sony managed to get itself into lately, and you can see how it would only amplify the existing problems.
Basically, Sony has all the reasons to fight for more players, and you could watch them getting in a panic to copy WoW ever since it got launched and their EQ2 barely survived. There are a lot of disjointed, poorly planned, uninspired changes that their games went through precisely to try to copy WoW. The history of the last couple of years at Sony has been almost 100% trying to play catch with WoW.
The problem is that they don't have any designer who even understands _why_ WoW did well, or what actually worked. So they're taking random guesses, managing at most to annoy the players whose characters just got massively changed, but not quite to hit the mark. Or come even within 1 mile of it. It's like watching a (piss-poor) cook trying to copy someone else's dish that sells better, and going, "Oh, they used salt too. I get it! People love salt. I'll put 10 times more salt in mine!" But I digress.
On the bright side, this sounds like the kind of a change which, if done even half-way sane, at least doesn't mess anyone's existing character or annoy the existing players in any other way. Then again, it's Sony. I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to screw up even this.