SOE and Perpetual Entertainment announced that SOE was no longer publishing Gods and Heroes. Except, wait, they are, sort of! Are you confused? Do you need a score card? Fear not, I am here to pontificate on things I only dimly understand myself.
First off, for those that are unfamiliar: the developer is the company that actually creates the game itself. For example, World of Warcraft was developed by Blizzard, but published by Vivendi. City of Heroes was developed by Cryptic Studios, but published by NCsoft.
Now, what publishers do is a bit more complex, and changes from publisher to publisher. For example, in World of Warcraft’s case, Vivendi did very little other than press CDs, (presumably) pay for marketing and, well, count money. Blizzard handles their own customer service, live teams, server hosting, and also now sells the game’s expansion themselves online. Blizzard is almost but not quite a self publisher; when you get millions of subscribers you start to get the economy of scale necessary to do everything.
At the other end of the scale is the relationship between Cryptic and NCsoft for City of Heroes. City of Heroes servers are hosted at NCsoft, and NCsoft handles the billing, technical support, and customer service, leaving Cryptic to add new content via game patches. This is handy for small development teams that don’t want to worry about hiring GMs and figuring out credit card chargebacks, but it also usually means they get less of a share in the game’s revenue. And of course, some publishers also have development teams (such as SOE and Everquest, and NCsoft and Tabula Rasa).
So, what appears to have happened is that the agreement between Perpetual and SOE on what SOE would bring to the table for Gods and Heroes changed. Now why that is could be several different reasons, all of which are duly wending their way through the rumorsphere (SOE didn’t want their name on Gods and Heroes! Perpetual didn’t want SOE’s name on Gods and Heroes! The game sucks and SOE wanted out! The game rocks and Perpetual wanted it themselves!) but truthfully, at this point, and from my totally-kibitzing-from-the-sidelines vantage point, like most changes in contracts, it is most likely about money. And the who, why and how on that will most likely never see the light of day, and what’s more, would probably bore the pants off anyone not directly involved.
At any rate, it’s grist for discussion – as more money pours into the MMO space, you’ll see lots more backroom dealings like this. Hopefully with cigar smoke – that makes everything better.
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Will it be long before we see the likes of MGM, Paramount, or Lucasarts on — wait …
There’s an interesting look at some of the options in these relationships if you go back to the Pirates of the Burning Sea announcement: http://www.burningsea.com/pages/page.php?pageKey=news/article&article_id=10349
Blizzard is a bit of a bad example, since Vivendi owns Blizzard. The distinction between the two, in this case, is irrelevant.
Ok,
So use Vivendi and Dark Age of Camelot – essentially the same thing as Scott’s example – you could also call this arrangement ‘distribution’
One note that I have – a split revenue situation is a recipe for cancellation at low numbers – (See Shadowbane/Auto Assault)
It is much easier for one piece of the pie to become unprofitable when it is sliced up.
Now, you’ve got to fuck up a MMO on an amazing level to be unprofitable with 100% of the revenue.
Someone link me up to the place where it explains why I should care about Gods and Heroes as opposed to any other MMO. Steig Hedlund isn’t enough of a reason by himself.
What? I haven’t even had time to get over my disappointment that Richard Garriott used the “shallow consumer lifestyle disrupted by alien attack” meme for Tabula Rasa!
Steig Hedlund isn’t enough of a reason by himself.
Ah. J. making a comment just to show he still knows the who’s who.
So is NCSoft the developer or publisher of Lineage?
Before this announcement, Perpetual was doing all the development and was ramping up to operate the game as well — server farms, ops team, customer service, etc. SOE’s role was to do marketing and retail distribution. Of course, SOE would make comments and give advice, but it was up to Perpetual to take it, or not.
This announcement seems to suggest that the above isn’t changing, and the only difference is that SOE’s name will not appear on the box. I haven’t been able to figure out if there’s more to it than that. However, if that is indeed all that’s changed, the obvious question is: why?
I was playing the game at gen-con this past weekend…and it was the SOE Booth, right beside Tabula Rasa. Seems like they’re both still involved at this point at least.
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