Like many other industry luminaries, Sony Online Entertainment CEO John Smedley sees the MMO industry shifting drastically away from its pay-to-play subscription models in the near future.
Smedley's main point -- and I think one that resonates with a lot of industry decision-makers -- is that the free-to-play market simply opens your game to so many more people. "These games are more accessible to people if the barrier to entry isn't a credit card," Smedley says.
Continuing, Smedley provides the greatest argument for the free subscription business plan: "In order for people to see the games, they have to be able to play them; we're opening them up to that possibility by letting them play for free."
In the past, Sony has been one of the most influential supporters in the argument over virtual item sales. While Second Life was created almost specifically to facilitate such transactions, SOE was the first major traditional MMO company to support the sales of in-game items in their games such as Everquest II, Star Wars Galaxies and the upcoming The Agency.
Smedley, in support of that position, wants to clarify to players and the industry at large, that the key to that sort of permissiveness, for Sony at least, is to make items available for sale that do not specifically give an advantage to a player. "Our position on the selling of items, and I realize this is a controversial position, is always to focus on non-game-altering items." he says.
Certainly that answers those who would decry the system for allowing players to buy their way through the game's grind.
Continuing along that same logical path, Smedley casually mentioned SOE's commitment to reversing the trend as well; they also would like to see item's that are traditionally sold in stores as in-game drops. Smedley says, "we have been debating in [Legends of Norrath] about having 30-day timecards as some of the loot cards."
It's almost guaranteed that most companies are going to prefer utilizing the route that forces players to give them real-world cash to play their addicting MMO-of-the-moment, the inclusion of in-game time cards as dropped items in any game would be wildly successful.
Smedley's final comments were on the subject of peripheral services -- Thottbot, for instance, is a website whose entire focus (and sole revenue source) is providing information to* World of Wacraft* players.
Smedley would like to see sites like these given the full support of developers. As he says, "I want us to push forward in the direction of people evangelizing our games," then adding some vague comments about his intent to allow peripheral companies to "buy in" to the game.
Whether he's referring to Sony's intent to charge these sites for their use of SOE's IPs or if he would rather see these sites actively funded by Sony is sort of up in the air, but you can bet that Thottbot, Allakhazam and the like are reading his words with great interest.
A CES interview with SOE CEO John Smedley [Massively]
