Last night while recovering from a wipe, I was browsing my RSS feeds and was stunned by Ogrebear’ story that SOE was to be bought out by an Indian entertainment company, Zapak. That spread throughout the blogosphere by wildfire, and even to the people at SOE, who hadn’t heard about this, frantically e-mailed John Smedley about it, and found out, as we all did, that the rumor was false.
This whole thing had blown over before I went to bed. Apparently the news that SOE was looking for an Indian partner with which to develop games for the Indian market had been combined with Zapak visiting SOE offices and then *boom*.
Here’s the official-looking press release which has been reprinted in many websites world-wide; this one was from Reuters, which (you’d think) wouldn’t print falsehoods. Significantly, there’s nothing about this on the Zapak homepage or forums (looks more like a game portal, so perhaps they wouldn’t announce it there). (By the way, the Zapak forums desperately need a moderator…)
MrrX has done a great job juggling the various press releases to get at what is probably closest to the actual truth.
So maybe, this time, SOE continues as it was, and this is nothing more than misplaced excitement around SOE’s Ramayana 3392 AD MMO.
Still, SOE was once the dominant player in the MMO field, with EverQuest, and is now staggering beneath the weight of too many MMOs and a diluted presence. It would not surprise me at all if Sony sold the portions of SOE not working on Playstation titles off and SOE took that opportunity to streamline and relaunch itself. Certainly, news of next-generation MMOs like WA-Mythic’s Warhammer: Age of Reckoning and Actizard’s unannounced follow-up to World of Warcraft has to have them wondering how they will respond; for all their innovation, The Agency and Free Realms do not look like chartbusters in the same league as the others.
Nobody would be the least bit surprised if the PC-MMO side of SOE was sold off, and that gave this rumor such power. What concerned everyone most were the rumors that development would be shifted overseas — seems everything is being outsourced to India already…
I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re here at the end of 2008, talking about how SOE’s acquisition went… maybe (probably) not by Zapak… but I totally would not be surprised if a big multinational like NCSoft bought them out. And would any of us mind so much? For a Korean company, NCSoft gives a lot of freedom to its North American development houses.
4 thoughts on “SOE: Tempest in a Teapot”
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Reuters has a habit of not checking the facts. Right now time will tell. With Smed saying it’s a lie and all these sources saying it’s so theres really only one thing you can do: Wait.
I can’t imagine it’s really true. They’re all picking up the same news story; that makes it a single source.
I’m a traditionalist. At this point I want it to stay SOE simply because it’s always been that way. Then again I don’t have the vision to see what a sale could accomplish for Sony’s many games. I just have a sense that a sale would have to be a bad thing.
if some other company bought it who knows what kind of crap they’ll do,