SOE's John Smedley
The online segment's president on bringing FreeRealms to the PS3 - and beyond
You're right, and that's part of the learning experience that we've had. One of the things that gives us a good competitive advantage is that we've now successfully launched two MMOs on the PS3 platform - and one for the PS2.
So we've got three console MMOs under our belts, and no one else can say that.
Well, simply put it's a console game at heart now, so we've made the updating and all that stuff seamless. Users just log-in, and they don't even need to type anything because they're already logged in to the PlayStation Network - they just hit a button and they're in our game.
So we've made it simple and easy, and we've made the interface streamlined, so they can communicate either by voice or by quick chat - and we've just tried to make it as simple as possible.
We won't really know for a few days, but in our testing everything went so smoothly that we think everything will just work; and people are going to love it. We'll have to wait and see what the users think, and what they tell us.
"We've seen triple-digit growth in those sections of our business - it's just a very interesting way to monetise things. I think free-to-play is a big part of the industry's future."
I think it could take five or six years - that should give you some idea. But I don't see any reason why it can't go to 100 million, because there are so many kids out there. And the great thing about a kids' game, and this is different for an adult audience and people don't think about this, is that there are always more kids.
That endless supply of children that have a hunger for gaming, as long as we keep improving it and make sure it's still relevant - which we do every month with patches - means that we expect the game to have a long life.
One of our other games, Everquest, has just hit its twelfth birthday - and I can definitely see FreeRealms doing that.
If you ask me that question in a week, I'd give you an estimate. But at the moment I don't know. I wouldn't give out our internal estimates, because they could be radically out one way or another.
We're trying something new - we're bringing a kids' game to the PS3, and we're hopeful that a lot of adults will try it too. But what we're really hopeful is that the family will game together around the TV, and that it's an online game that parents will be proud to let their kids play - and feel safe with that.
Because it's a free-to-play game, we're radically changing the business model for PS3 games too. That's a big, big advance - to go free-to-play on the PS3.
I think it's probably a little bit earlier on the curve, but not by much. They're used to DLC - they just call it something different on console. Five years ago micro-transactions were not mainstream in the US, and we made a heavy investment in them in all our games, and that paid off.
We've seen triple-digit growth in those sections of our business - it's just a very interesting way to monetise things. I think free-to-play is a big part of the industry's future.