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Industry analysts expressed surprise at this news It’s official: per CFO Eric Brown, during an earnings conference call, SWTOR is making a lot of money, with 1.7m subscribers (which Brown went to an unusual effort to quantify correctly as a mix of paying customers and customers with billing information entered but still on free trial) and over 2m sell-through (copies sold to actual customers as opposed to sitting on store shelves). Brown said EA was actually able to add a lot more users on a per-server basis, thanks to some technical improvements. He also noted that about 40% of the … [Link]

EverQuest is going free-to-play and the team covered the basics on this exciting change. This week Eric “Piestro” Cleaver sat down with Thom “Phathom” Terrazas (EverQuest Producer) and Adam “Ngreth” Bell (EverQuest Lead Designer) to answer the players’ questions and give details on the specifics of EverQuest Free to Play. Your Way. The guys gave a general outline about why we are making this change and how we are fully committed to taking EQ into the future. If you missed the webcast on February 2, 2012, watch it below, or explore our YouTube channel. Keep an eye on Facebook or … [Link]

Today, I had cause to take a photograph of a printout of MUD1 dated 12th June, 1985. I think it's probably the oldest copy I have (I gave my oldest ones to Stanford University Library). The .MAS extension is because it contains a bunch of files together. A program on the DEC-10 called SUBFIL was used to collect files and create one bug file with the sub-files in it; the same program could split them apart. It's a bit like a .ZIP file, except without the encryption (because if it were encrypted, you couldn't print it out). As for why … [Link]

Here's a professional tip for those getting in the MMO consultancy business. If, after signing a non-disclosure agreement for a project, you feel that you wouldn't really have wanted to disclose it anyway, it's probably not worth taking the contract. Not that anything recently has happened to trigger my mentioning this or anything… [Link]

He could be a contender! [Link]

Jason Wall sent me a note explaining that World of Warcraft (you've heard of it?) is doing even more to encourage the formation of ad hoc raiding groups. Back in the day, he notes, the only way you could get raid-level gear was by being in a raid-level guild and by raiding, a lot. Much was said back then (not least by me) about the way MMORPGs seemed to provide a communal experience for people isolated by contemporary society. If society gave people anomie, then online community, it seemed, was the antidote. How pollyannish! We (I) also said that online… [Link]

Stuck Like Glue: Zynga Accounts for 12 Percent of Facebook Revenue in 2011: Facebook said social games are currently responsible for “substantially all of our revenue” when it comes from payments. In December, Zynga went public, raising $1 billion, and is obviously one of the companies most reliant on the social network. But now with Facebook’s financials also public, we can see that the two companies are actually interdependent. [Link]

By: Aimee “Ashlanne” Rekoske The Community Team would like to introduce the February 2012 SOE Gamer of the Month, Tankenstein from EverQuest. In the near future you may also hear answers to questions he submitted for an SOE Podcast! Where in the real life world do you live (city and state)? I currently reside in a small town north of Salt Lake City, Utah, called Clearfield. What SOE game(s) do you play? The original EverQuest (woot) mainly, but have ventured into EQ II once. How long have you played the above game(s)? Started in 2004 but had a few breaks, … [Link]

One of the really hard things to do as an entrepreneur is to not try and solve for too many problems at once. I’ve found it is one of the first things I end up talking to early stage entrepreneurs about (twice today, actually). And something I struggle with myself. We like to think strategically: “what if we had that many customers?” “how is this going to scale?” “how would we deal with that competitor if they did this?” This is exacerbated because we spend more time thinking about our business than anyone else. This is made worse because every … [Link]

The following was published in the Nov 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine… “You have to design for success, plan for failure, and then know how to rebound from that failure. Our 1.0 version of AI War was successful but not wildly so. Little irritations added up and annoyed people enough that they stopped playing. When the public gets the game, they find problems that you never did, and you must devote time to fixing them. Once you do, the fans are happy, and the game becomes more successful than it would have been otherwise. You have to eat a … [Link]