Sony Sells Everquest

I didn’t see this story making the rounds in BlogNation and probably due to the Massively and WoW Insider closing news – which I do want to address briefly. While said so much better by so many in our space, the loss of those reporting sources will be missed. I checked both frequently weekly. WoW Insider hit this blog with a linkback many years ago (June 2009) and it created a fun discussion. The link was about how many kids were born into our our WoW guild at the time.

Since the guild was formed at the beggining of Burning Crusade, we have had 12 kids born into guild members. Hell, that’s a solid 10 person raid group (with rotations, even). It’s a fun thought – a group of adult gamers grouped by an in game tag sharing parenting tips for newborns (after they read the Yogg-Saron strats, mind you)

That generated me a few hits and it was fun to be linked to by a major gaming news site. Other guilds chimed in on how many kids they had spawned and it was a fun little competition.

Massively also linked to me recently so it is nice when the big guys recognize us little guys – that is community building and I’d often see them do it to additional sites.

SOE will now be Daybreak Game Company – an interesting choice of words  that may tie the hopes of H1Z1 to the “new” studio. Mr. Smedley is the President of DGC and at least we can be certain of fun and interesting tweets for some time yet. The real positive news for the change is that the company can now produce games for the Xbox One platform, opening up a lot more opportunity in the console space.

“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 [emphasis added],” Daybreak president John Smedley said in a statement.

That same quote makes me wonder how much of their future is on multi-platform focused games as opposed to PC only (ie: MMOs) and like much of the announcement things will become more clear in time. Since the company is a private investment firm, not only were details not shared of the purchase but we won’t have quarterly earnings reports to look forward to over-scrutinize and read into. We will be at the whim of whatever their marketing departments decide to share with us (which isn’t that far from what we get from public firms otherwise).

Hopefully EQ and some of the legacy titles continue to get the investment into them that they return to the company. Again, will be very interesting to see.