Sony Online Entertainment Interview
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Q: Considering that a segment of the fanbase for each of these games has reacted negatively to these changes, is SOE willing in the short term to lose a few customers in exchange for a wider appeal in the future? How does this loss/potential gain impact the decisions behind these changes? What level of importance is given to the existing customers in relation to the potential customers?
A: There has never been such a dramatic update to a live online game as we made with Star Wars Galaxies. This was not a decision that Sony Online Entertainment and LucasArts made without a good deal of thought. Ultimately, we decided that it was in the best interest of both the community and the game to make this switch. Both SOE and LEC feel that the New Game Experience will ultimately result in a larger population of players in Star Wars Galaxies. However, you can see that our developers are trying their hardest to make sure that there is still a place for the player base that was already part of the game.
One of the biggest challenges in running a live game is walking the line between making sure your long-term customers are happy while continuing to keep the game appealing to new players. If we focused solely on the desires of the level 50+ players, new players would feel completely useless and starting zones would become deserted. Eventually, new players would stop coming in to the game, and it would slowly sputter out. Obviously, we don't want this to happen. By the same token, we need to keep offering new content and new adventures for mid and high level players in order to retain our core subscribers. I feel that SOE has done a great job of walking this line over the years, as is evident by the several hundred thousand people we have playing EQ seven years after launch.
