SoE possibly buying Sigil

[Martrae]

http://forums.station.sony.com/vg/posts ... ic_id=8569

[Ginzburgh]

And irony wins again!

[Lyion]

Thanks for the link. I still have no idea why SOE would buy a game that competes directly with what they already have.

I guuess if they buy enough MMOs, they'll get near WOW.

It also appears they might relaunch Vanguard. I'm thinking SWG NGE type deal. I'm not sure if I'm pleased with this development. I'll have to consider if I want to keep subscribing.

"SOE is in discussions with Sigil regarding the future of Vanguard and Sigil Games in Carlsbad. Talks are going well and first and foremost, our primary concern right now is what's best for Vanguard and its community. We want to ensure that this game and its community have a healthy future. The specifics that we work out over the coming days will all be with that single goal in mind."

What does that mean? It means that right now Vanguard is doing decently but not as well as we hoped. If you haven't read my last long post that outlined some of the things that went wrong during development, etc., please do. So the bottom line is that SOE is going to be getting more involved with Sigil and Vanguard - our relationship is going to become even tighter - much tighter. At this point I can't say much more than that.

Does this mean an acquisition? I can't say at this point.

Does this mean more or less people at Sigil? I can't say at this point.

Does this mean management changes at Sigil? I can't say at this point.

What it does mean at this point is that both companies agree that we need more of SOE's involvement if Vanguard is going to continue to get the support it needs to both continue to be worked on and improved and debugged and optimized.

When people start getting burned out of the Warcraft expansion (pardon the pun), we need to make sure that the game is more polished and will play on lower end machines.

As people continue to level up, it means that we need additional higher level content, including raid content. If we are going to change our marketing message effectively to target those who played a lot of EverQuest but who have ‘grown up' such that they have jobs, families, etc. that they cannot and will not play another EverQuest even though they enjoyed they game years ago.

We've done studies and it's not atypical of an old EQ player, when they hear about Vanguard, to assume that because many of the people involved in Vanguard's development worked on EQ as well, that Vanguard must simply be an EQ 3. From that point they don't even give Vanguard another look. They don't do any more research on the game. They don't go to the official sites. They don't go to the affiliate sites. Instead they think to themselves, "ah well, were I younger and had my life not changed, I'd give it a shot, but I just don't have the time for another EQ with better graphics right now."

And that's it - they don't give Vanguard another thought EQ peaked in late 2001 at almost 500k subscribers. In its lifetime it's sold over 2 million units. Putting EQ in a vacuum and that's a lot of people who played and who aren't playing anymore. And the total number of subscribers didn't start going down until sometime 2002. I'm also pretty sure up until its peak that the average lifespan of a player was nearing 9-12 months. And as I mentioned in my last lengthy post, this group of people who played but don't anymore could arguably be put into two sub-groups - those who look back fondly at those months and even years and those who don't.

I have read posts and received emails from people who claim to have played to max level and then quit very angry - the "I just played your game for 2 years and now I hate you" emails. But realistically how big is that group? Even if it was half (boggle) the other group is still pretty big. So ignoring all of the people who have quit or who are growing bored of their current MMOG (WoW, FFXI, DAoC, etc) that need to be reached (and in a very different way, especially the WoW player), both a word of mouth and a formal marketing campaign targeting these people clearly needs to launched.

These people need to know that Vanguard does have the ‘EQ feel' in many ways but that it is much more soloable than EQ was, especially the early EQ days. They need to know that you can play for short periods of time and advance. They need to know that the ‘end game' is not all about raiding into the wee hours of the night. Some subset of these people will still feel burnt out of MMOGs period, but I think there's a lot of people who haven't been reached and our and others research supports that. False assumptions are being made by a lot of people. The reality is that Vanguard *is* the game most of these people are looking for - it has the good they remember, but has eliminated a lot of the tedium and necessary long hours that don't fit into their lifestyle anymore.

Then there are the people who are growing weary of their current MMOG. Given how much larger the MMOG gamespace has grown since EQ's zenith in 2001 (arguably 7 times as large worldwide, and at least 2-3 time as large in North America alone), we have to take advantage of this. At some point these people are going to want to start a new MMOG (especially after the WoW expansion newness has worn out, which for most of the non-hard-core would be when you really have to start raiding in the expansion). LoTR Online is an x-factor - reviews from beta testers seem to indicate that the game is more casual like WoW, a small game, and that it looks really good but can run on a lower end system much better than Vanguard (just as WoW can).

So at least for a time the more casual bored WoW player may migrate to LoTR Online. How sticky (e.g. how long that game will hold onto players) is unknown, but I think it's safe to say that a significant percentage of the more casual bored WoW player will head to LoTR - at least first, given the franchise around it. Conservatively this leaves the more hard core WoW player (which in Vanguard or EQ terms would be considered either a hard core or, more likely, a core gamer). That number, even just taking the North American and European gamer is still potentially a large one and needs to be targeted (given Vanguard's high system specs, the time it will take to localize, and Blizzard's name recognition and pre-existing proven marketing ability in Asia, I wouldn't count that group, although a very significant one, until 2008 or so. Targeting that group is for a future discussion).

Lastly, there's the very real issue of Vanguard's system specs, even for the core and hard core gamer in North America and Europe. For a variety of reasons and mistakes on our part that I won't get into right now, Vanguard was released with system spec requirements that were too high for January 2007. Continued optimization will help to a degree, but the game's big hope here is simply Moore's Law and that by the second half of 2007, and certainly by the end of the year, the system spec issue will have been greatly diminished.

The big problem that remains is that you still pretty much need a new system as opposed to, say, simply a new graphics card. But eventually, gamers do replace their systems. Given what Vista (especially the Ultimate edition) takes to really run, combined with other games that come out by the end of the year that really push technology, many people will be compelled to buy new systems. Unlike EQ, which was one of the first hardware only games, Vanguard needs not only a fast graphics card, but also a system with pci-express, fast memory, a fast FSB, etc. With EQ, you just needed to buy a Voodoo 1 or Voodoo 2 - the rest of your system is fine.

With Vanguard, however, just plugging the fastest AGP card into your 2-3 year old system doesn't cut it. In fact, Vanguard runs pretty well on a 2 GB system with a decent pci-express video card and fast memory in a 2.6 GHz Pentium; conversely, run the game on an older AGP system, the fastest AGP card you can buy, and a 3.2 GHz CPU and you'll have framerate issues. The game is simply not CPU bound, nor just graphics card bound, but rather mostly bound by the data that it needs to constantly move from the CPU to main memory to the graphics card, and then all the way back again.

It's all about the various bus speeds and caches - moving data around efficiently is arguably more important than processing that data on the CPU or GPU. The only fix here, again, is time. Vista (especially the Ultimate edition, which is what's being pushed to gamers) wants fast components. Direct X 10 hardware and software will help a lot, especially when there is a DX10 version of Vanguard. A native 64bit client of Vanguard will eventually help a lot too. Bottom line: by the end of 2007, a lot more people should have upgraded, especially if Microsoft succeeds with Vista and native DX 10 games.

And if they really push Gaming for Windows like they did, say, the Xbox 360, the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008 should be a very different landscape for PC games in general and Vanguard specifically. Was the Vanguard tech ahead of its time? Yes, and there has been a price to pay for that short term (although many people are able to play with older machines - why? Different configurations, different settings, different thresholds for lower framerates, etc.). But MMOGs ideally never end and if you've architected your engine to both push the limits of existing and near future technology as well as easily employ future technologies, then you have a game that doesn't look dated one, two, even three plus years down the road. And that's what we did with Vanguard - so we feel some pain now, but if we can keep the momentum going, this decision pays off in the long run (big time).

In summary, there are arguably a lot of people who by mid to end of this year in the MMOG gamespace for whom Vanguard could potentially be very attractive. What the game needs is a re-launch of sorts, including targeted marketing campaigns, an all-around successful move by gamers to the next generation of hardware, continued good word of mouth ‘viral' marketing by those who are already playing, enjoying, and re-subscribing. And all of this could and should ramp up by the end of the year, all the while the Vanguard team is putting in more content, the live team filling out high level content as well as adding to areas of the game's vast seamless world which are a bit empty.

Then a re-launch towards the end of the year plus the first expansion (which is looking like first quarter 200SMILEY8), one that would add RTS style city building, ship to ship combat, jousting, and a second ‘half' of the Kojanese Archipelago that makes ship travel meaningful - and by meaningful I mean not tedious, rewarding exploration, with lots of new areas (both in the existing world and in the extension of the archipelago). And I'm talking about some re-use of existing art, combined with new art that fits into the existing continents, and then finally some all out new stuff - different styles of terrain (islands) and ocean to look at while making your journey to found a new player city while constantly being attacked by exotic sea creatures, leviathans, and other traditional members of fantasy and crypto-zoology.

Not to mention pirates with canons, or other players and their ships on the PvP servers. And who knows, could be first expansion or second, but eventually you need to pull from Mesoamerican mythology, encounter empires based on Greco-roman architecture... it goes on and on, it's all planned out, and Vanguard can do all of it given sufficient time. The tools have matured, both in terms of art and design, and the art process orders of magnitude more efficient because of years of Maya scripting, an in-house terrain generator that creates what you want as opposed to spitting out algorithmically generated hills and valleys, and an art team that has this process down pat - for example, they were able to re-create Tursh and Leth Nurae in a fraction of time it took them to create the original, smaller, and much less interesting ‘versions'.

[Arlos]

*shrug* Sigil is already joined to SOE at the hip anyway, this'd just formalize the relationship, really.

-Arlos

[Tacks]

Pretty much, wouldn't be much change. If anything it would give them more financial backing to fix the game.

[Lyion]

Good write up from Scott Jennings on the Vanguard situation


SOE to snap up Sigil? - Scott Jennings.


Rumors to that effect have been swirling madly about the interweb last week, and today Brad McQuaid, in his usual brief style, discussed everything within, but not including, a 5-foot radius of those rumors.

The money paragaph, and probably taken from Sigil’s pitch to SOE verbatim:

I think it’s safe to say that both Sigil and SOE see the potential of a mind blowing game by the end of the year. What’s needed, bottom line, is some time, and how to get that time is what’s being worked out. And so I still see a 500k+ game, I was just off by a year for a variety of reasons, some under my control, many not. And I think SOE sees this as well. To pull it off however, requires a funded and supported Sigil and a well marketed Vanguard with these different target audiences identified and solid plan on how to reach them all, and then a solid execution of said plan, hitting them hard, pushing these ‘WoW everywhere’ point of purchase materials from the front to the very back.. In the meantime, the Vanguard that was launched in early 2007 continues to move forward, with much of what I’ve talked about patched in over time, and the rest in the first expansion (or re-launch, or whatever we all agree upon in terms of product and service placement).

McQuaid analyzes the current market landscape hopefully (Hey, Burning Crusade has a silly raid progression, so casuals will come… try Vanguard! Lord of the Rings may not have a meaningful endgame so raiders may come… try Vanguard!) and sees a possible opening for a retooled Vanguard to take the world by storm. Unfortunately, it’s going to be difficult. Why?

You can’t make games for next year’s PCs. A good portion of McQuaid’s essay deals with the hope that gamers will, en masse, upgrade their systems to Vista, and in so doing have a machine that can, well, run Vanguard. Except that… gamers aren’t buying Vista. No one seems to be, actually. I just spent an evening yanking it off my machine.

World of Warcraft is successful for about 500 reasons. One of them is that anyone can run it. Its system requirements are low. It’s one of the few games I can comfortably run on my laptop. This is not insignificant. And it was very intentional (as Rob Pardo explained during his AGC keynote address) - to really have market penetration, you have to have as few roadblocks as possible. And an engine that requires… well, as McQuaid describes it:

Vanguard needs not only a fast graphics card, but also a system with pci-express, fast memory, a fast FSB, etc. With EQ, you just needed to buy a Voodoo 1 or Voodoo 2 - the rest of your system is fine. With Vanguard, however, just plugging the fastest AGP card into your 2-3 year old system doesn’t cut it. In fact, Vanguard runs pretty well on a 2 GB system with a decent pci-express video card and fast memory in a 2.6 GHz Pentium; conversely, run the game on an older AGP system, the fastest AGP card you can buy, and a 3.2 GHz CPU and you’ll have framerate issues. The game is simply not CPU bound, nor just graphics card bound, but rather mostly bound by the data that it needs to constantly move from the CPU to main memory to the graphics card, and then all the way back again. It’s all about the various bus speeds and caches - moving data around efficiently is arguably more important than processing that data on the CPU or GPU.

That’s not a roadblock. That’s a barricade manned by surly Somali gunmen in technicals, demanding all your RAM and motherboard bandwidth so they can trade it to IGE for qat leaves. And it sounds suspiciously like blaming your users’ purchasing and upgrade habits for your engine coding.

The market isn’t going to stand still. Sure, Vanguard launched against Burning Crusade. Then soon thereafter, Lord of the Rings launched. McQuaid describes this market as though these are where all his potential users have strayed, soon to return once they’re bored. Except that assumes that by that point, there won’t be Warhammer, and Conan, and WoW’s 2nd expansion, and any number of other new and shiny games. You can’t assume that you’ll have a chance once the new shiny wears off. The new shiny will always be with us. Which leads into:

You only get one chance. Sounds brutal. Is true.

Why? Because once your game no longer is that new shiny, you’re wrestling for users amongst the pool of churn, those players that hop from game to game and the occasional new convert achieved through word of mouth or web site ad or what have you. The problem is that finding those players is exponentially more expensive than just picking up the curious at first launch. When you first launch, you have no expectations (save those holes your marketing department or logorrheic message board posters dig for you). There’s a critical mass of new players, out of which social groupings can form among each other.

But afterwards, you have to deal with the fact that most players will be trickling in, and interacting with what community already exists. And if your launch didn’t go well? That community is ANGRY. Bad launches kill games.

Vanguard can, in a year, be the second coming of Robot Telon Jesus, and it won’t matter, without a concerted rebuilding effort. It’s not easy. As far as I know, there are only two games who have managed this: Eve Online and Anarchy Online. And neither have the mass market numbers McQuaid still expects. If Sigil/SOE does manage to turn the ship of Telon around, it will be a “world first”. They’ll have to significantly retool the client - not just expect users to upgrade to its level. They’ll have to have a clear path of content for users to explore, and a friendly community to embrace new users as they begin. (Anarchy Online has player volunteers that literally warp in and offer to help new players as they start, for example.) And even then… with all that… will Vanguard reach McQuaid’s oft-quoted and again-restated goal of 500,000 customers?

A better goal is a game that is slowly growing, self-sustaining, and with an active community. No one playing Eve really cares if they have 50k or 500k users - they have a fun game and they know it’s not going anywhere. That’s an example worth emulating.

[Tossica]

The one thing that Vanguard has though is that it's fun. It's frustrating and needs a lot of work but I have a blast when I play it. I haven't had fun playing a MMO since EQ.

[Lyion]

The problem is Vanguard is a beta level product. The engine is poorly optimized, the world and quests are full of bugs, and the classes are getting overhauled every patch.

The next bigger problem is will they completely change the game due to poor sales and low subscription rates? I don't see how they can't.

SOE is not going to give Sigil millions of dollars to develop this game, in my opinion, unless there is some basis for it in their collection. They have EQ and EQ2, so what will Vanguards gameplan be?

Finally, Brads post is a very pie in the sky, we can fix it as soon as all the people buy new gaming rigs mentality. That is really not a good basis for a games future, which I bet Smed knows after releasing EQ2 as a high end game with so much negative feedback.

I see a lot of options for Vanguard, and none look that appealing.

[Dylan]

My computer could run EQ2 and WoW at the same time and it can't even run one screen of Vanguard without lag. Why should I spend $1,000 just to play a stupid game that I might not like anyway?