Paul Vebber
Posts: 11472
Joined: 3/29/2000
From: Portsmouth RI
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02:00 AM May. 12, 2003 PT
Massive multiplayer online games will get some heavy buzz at this week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles.
The buzz will be darker after a disappointing year for many high-profile launches. Languid sales follow the much-ballyhooed The Sims Online, a darling of last year’s show. And Sony Online and LucasArts’ highly anticipated Star Wars Galaxies was delayed. Such virtual worlds were to be the great white hope of the video game industry.
"On the E3 hype meter, last year these games were an eight or a nine,” says Mark Jacobs, president of Mythic Entertainment, whose Dark Age of Camelot was released in 2000 and has 230,000 active subscribers. "This year it’s still going to be a nine, but it’s a lot more negative."
Industry analysts and insiders agree that the mood could turn a bit more positive once attendees actually start looking at the games on display, if only because developers and publishers will be showing or discussing multiplayer games involving hot entertainment franchises.
Among the biggies, Vivendi Universal will be touting online projects surrounding Lord of the Rings, the Marvel Comics universe, and its hugely successful Warcraft franchise.
Sony Online will be pushing its soon-to-be-released PlanetSide, a space-based epic and the first multiplayer game that is a so-called first-person shooter. The company also has a follow-on to its hugely successful medieval role-playing game EverQuest. And Star Wars Galaxies will be released in the fall of this year rather than in April when it was planned.
Still, disappointment surrounding The Sims Online has been a reality check for an industry that had hoped subscription-based multiplayer games would solve two problems.
The first is to free the game industry from its dependence on selling boxed products at retail for PCs and consoles such as Sony’s Playstation 2 and Microsoft’s Xbox. Subscription-based online games that build substantial audiences -- paying as much as $13 a month -- are gifts that would keep on giving, month after month, year after year.
Second, the industry was closely watching The Sims Online to see whether Electronic Arts could expand the audience for online games beyond the mostly young male audiences. "Guys without dates," as they are referred to in the industry, have heretofore been the primary population of gamers. The hugely successful The Sims franchise has an audience that is largely female.
The Sims Online was released in December of last year amid lofty expectations. With earlier versions of The Sims having sold better than any game in PC history -- and now doing a booming business on consoles -- EA executives openly discussed reaping as many as 1 million active monthly subscribers globally for the online version. That would far outstrip the 470,000 subscribers to EverQuest, the most popular virtual world to date.
EA backed up its bet by spending as much as $20 million on the project, while committing a large team of A-list talent from its Maxis development studio.
Nearly six months later, The Sims Online has sold 125,000 copies retail, has been discounted from $50 to as low as $20 on Amazon and has 97,000 active subscribers.
cont at http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,58749-2,00.html
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