John Smedley grew up playing the “Dungeons & Dragons” fantasy-role playing board game during lunch. Today he’s president of Sony Online Entertainment. Smedley was in New York to give the keynote at the inaugural New York Games Conference, which was under extremely tight security. But it turned out they weren’t there to protect Smedley or the conference – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, was actually staying at the hotel across the street. That was the backdrop as Peter Suciu, a longtime video game writer in New York, sat down to talk with Smedley about the future of online games.
VB: Sony’s EverQuest was once the most popular, most talked about online role-playing game, but its been eclipsed by World of Warcraft. Do you ever see a way that an EverQuest property can recapture that top spot and regain the crown?
JS: EverQuest is a franchise that we have a lot of faith in, it’s been around 10 years now and we’ve released “EverQuest 2″ very successfully. We’ve run both games very profitably, and they’ve made a lot of money. More importantly they’ve made a lot of players very happy. So yes, we’re investing in the EverQuest franchise for the future. And you’ll see more EverQuest games in the future. We liked the look of the crown, and we’d like to put that back on.
VB: So maybe there will be a South Park episode centered around EverQuest?
JS: It is my dream! That was one of the funniest South Park episodes [featuring World of Warcraft], and that might just have been the best South Park episode ever. Look, I’m a fan of what the guys at Blizzard are doing. I’m super impressed with World of Warcraft. So to get on South Park, that and [The Colbert Report], are the dreams.
VB: All the of the most successful MMOs have had a fantasy element. The success of those games is something that not even “Sims Online” or even “Star Wars” could match, so why is the fantasy element such a draw for gamers?
JS: It has more to do with the gameplay in them, and in the case of Star Wars I think that is an IP that can reach millions and millions of people. From our perspective, at least while we were creating, it was a different time and a place. But what we’ve seen is that gameplay has evolved so quickly to become a bit more of the casual play and less of the super hardcore that we had started with EverQuest. So that’s something we’re adapting to, and that’s why we have [the free upocming MMO] “Free Realms” and we have “DC Universe Online” and why we have The Agency. We’re broadening out our demographic to be sure that we have games that fit in a lot of different genres, and therefore appeal to a wider range of gamers. I think it is possible to do big games that don’t have to be in the fantasy space. Read the rest of this entry »
