Former PlanetSide 2 Director Matt Higby Describes Smed as Maverick, Heart of Daybreak
Former creative director of PlanetSide 2 Matt Higby shared his thoughts about the news of Daybreak president John Smedley stepping down on Reddit:
It’s tough to overstate how gigantic of an influence Smed has had on my life and the lives of many of my friends, both through the games he helped create, the company he built, the mentorship he shared and the opportunities he opened up. Although we argued about a ton of things over the years, one of the best things about him as a leader is I never felt like I wasn’t allowed to make my case – I even won a couple of those arguments from time to time. He taught me a ton and always treated me super well – I owe him a great deal.
John ran SOE like a family, he knew just about everybody and did everything he could to take care of people over profits, promote from within, and make the workplace fun and rewarding for everyone. Loads of people there are 5,10,15 year vets – that’s not normal in games. I think his loyalty to the people he worked with is something generally omitted from his public persona which is really a shame since it feels so central to his identity to me.
Something else a lot of people don’t really get is that he was also extremely hands on – with everything – at all levels. I remember watching him do tech support for a network routing issue at a place we were doing a market research study for FreeRealms – 5 other engineers in the room and John was the first one rolling up his sleeves to diagnose the DMZ problems. He would personally approve game design docs for sub-features, webpage layouts, advertising verbage, art style, promotions – the works. If it happened at SOE, Smed was involved; he knew everything about it, and if he didn’t write the original plan he sure has hell made some changes to the original plan for it at some point. Definitely not a corner-office, bean counting CEO type – he wanted to get his hands dirty.
For us gamers, he’s the kind of maverick, passionate, risk-taking leader you want running a company. He loves to push the envelope – for better or worse. One of the #1 things I always hear said about Smed is that he’s a “bull in a china shop” – couldn’t agree more. This can create a lot of havoc of course and makes reliable product development & management a bit of a challenge, but it’s better than the alternative of insipid reliably-profitable clones that most industry CEOs are interested in cranking out of the cookie-cutters. The games landscape today would be way more bland without Smed – there can be no arguing this.
Smed will be back pushing a giant envelope full of something that will blow our minds over a mountain of freshly smashed china soon. For now, I am happy he’s taking some time off to get some rest, I hope he takes plenty. I think he needs it, and I know he deserves it.
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Comments (31)
Chinashop
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Good riddins! I’m so happy, happy, happy! He was a plague on Sony games and I’m in awe that he remained there this long.
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Nefa
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I think the following quote is very telling. We don’t know the day to day and overall I think this game has done well. I hope we can continue to do well without Smedly at the helm. Time will tell. Layoffs and workplace strife is hard. I hope you do well Smedly and ignore the children such as the original poster here.
John ran SOE like a family, he knew just about everybody and did everything he could to take care of people over profits, promote from within, and make the workplace fun and rewarding for everyone. Loads of people there are 5,10,15 year vets – that’s not normal in games. I think his loyalty to the people he worked with is something generally omitted from his public persona which is really a shame since it feels so central to his identity to me.
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GriffonLady
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It’s sad news. /..\ Pay no attention to the trolls who just find glee in any thing bad that happens to anyone.
I just hope that without the old leader, EQ2 doesn’t become another forgettable game like so many that are out there. A good game needs an enthusiastic, dedicated, and down with the fellow employees type of person. Smed seems like he was about as close to that as posible.
Here’s hoping who ever takes over has spirit, strength and vision, as well as a sense of community and balance.
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Feldon
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Smed has had almost no involvement in EQ2 for half a decade. He signs off on expansions and content updates of course, but the buck stops with the current dev team.
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Chinashop
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That’s a good example of leading from behind. CEO is a tough job. It’s one where you have to love your product line and take pride in your customer feedback. The result is revenue. Being CEO is 90% product development management and 10% customer/investor interaction. You need to be seen by your customers and show that you genuinely care about their concerns. You don’t lead a company from the golf coarse or your living room. This is the result.
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Wirewhisker
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Good grief, how much did Smed pay you to write that?
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Hoot
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So anyone who’s happy that Smedley has resigned is a troll? Are you kidding yourself? Of course Higby is going to praise Smedley, he was part of the upper clique that existed at SoE.
Giving the benefit of the doubt, Smedley did encourage that EQ1 be 3D. But outside of that, he’s made bad decision after bad decision. The EQ franchise is shriveling up and dying, PS2 is drastically losing players, and H1Z1 left a really bad taste in people’s mouths along with still not being a full launch a half year later after it was released as Early Access. This man had to go. He should’ve gone or been demoted a decade ago.
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GriffonLady
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ahem.. and sends out a hit squad after the loser squad
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Chinashop
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Smed is a trophy example of how NOT to run a company. My four year old niece runs her lemonade stand better than he ran SOE. He may be a good dev, but he was a horrible CEO. He had no business running a multi million dollar a year company like SOE. To this day he has no concept of customer service, new player recruitment or retention. So much potential has been lost! He only had one foot in the door.
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Caela
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And yet, I’ve never seen a current or former employee have anything bad to say about him. He seems to be well regarded by his peers in the gaming industry.
Arm chair CEO’s are a dime a dozen though – and their opinions are worth about as much.
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Nummutz
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Caela – You wont hear a bad word said about Jsmed. Influential people don’t get bad mouthed. He probably has enough contacts in the industry that if someone did say something he literally did not like it could back fire in a big way on that persons career.
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Hoot
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Than you been looking at the wrong places. Smedley has constantly been grilled by former employees over and over. Ever take a look at glassdoor reviews? They aren’t pretty.
http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Sony-Online-Entertainment-Reviews-E21279.htm
http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Daybreak-Game-Company-Reviews-E973097.htm
Also you say he’s ‘well regarded’ in the industry? By whom? I pay attention to the game industry and constantly keep tabs on notable people. I never seen any praise or comments about Smedley in the game industry.
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Ookabea
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I never heard him talk about anything except his pet Zombie game. . .
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Caela
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You should do some googling on Smed. If it wasn’t for him, there would be no EQ, EQ2, his pet Zombie game, or even MMORPG’s in general – he is the father of the genre.
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Nummutz
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Actually the father of the genre is Richard Garriott who in 1997 created and released Ultima Online. He is the one credited for popularizing MMORPG’s.
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GriffonLady
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But we aren’t playing Ultima Online. >.>
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Taka
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Brad McQuaid, you say?
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Archangel
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About Ultima Online.
Article has typos and other errors.
The Smedley Interview
July 27 2011
http://kithicor.org/show/smed
“On July 26th, 2011.. Jethal and Elquin had the interview they’ve been dreaming about for years.. The President of Sony Online Entertainment.. JOHN SMEDLEY!!””
(Jethal ) John Smedley, is the President of Sony Online Entertainment, and the founder.. or I should say.. author of EverQuest
(Smed ) author is a strong world
(Jethal ) one of the creators..
(Smed ) That’s a better way to put it, it was my idea originally, but Brad and Steve came up with the core ideas of it all
(Jethal ) How difficult was that? I mean, coming up with a game.. basically the first of it’s kind, wasn’t it?
(Smed ) No, yeah know.. it had many predecessors.. it had it’s roots kind of in a combination of DQ MUDs, Dungeons and Dragons, and there was Meridian 59, and Ultima Online, but when we started it in march 1996, Ultima hadn’t come online and those other games where very small.. so it was the first major scale MMO, beside UO.
(Elquin ) god, I remember trying out Meridian 59 too
(Smed ) you know what, Meridian 59 had a lot going for it and it’s funny, you look back on that stuff now, and it really was a really cool game, but it was older and back then we surpassed it with a lot of features that it didn’t have then, but, honestly those early games where a lot of trial and error from teams who did some amazing stuff
…
(Smed ) wow, you see, I played quiet a bit of MMO (hard to call it a MMO now) called Cyber-Strike. That’s actually what gave me the idea to do online games.. I played the heck of it. When I got married in April of 1994, we hadn’t lived together before, and my wife saw the first months bill, from Genie back then, which was $3 per hour.. and my wife. it was like “ok, let me get this straight, you play an online game.. and it’s costing us $600 a month?” (wows from J and E).. it was an education.. I guess it worked out OK though.
/*
“Q. If you could play one Sony game for the rest of your life what would it be?
A. PlanetSide for sure.”
http://www.planetside-universe.com/p-john-smedley-qa-79.htm
“On Saturday at Fan Faire 2011 after the major announcements were made we had a chance to sit down with John Smedley and pick his brain on PlanetSide 2 and what it means to him and SOE.”
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Archangel
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Caela
Nummutz
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/genre
GENRE: a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content
John Smedley is no more the “father of the genre”, than Henry Ford is the ‘father of automobiles’ (Karl Friedrich Benz), or Nolan Bushnell is the ‘creator of video games’ (Ralph Baer), or Bill Gates ‘invented DOS’ (Tim Paterson), or WoW is the ‘mother of all MMORPGs’ (Habitat or Neverwinter Nights or Ultima Online).
Abet Mr. Smedley/EverQuest was the inspiration for WoW.
There’s nothing wrong with defending or criticizing Mr. Smedley. But it’s going down the wrong path to promote puffery as fact.
Or ask Smed, if he wants to be known as the ‘father of MMORPGs.’
/*
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/canon/Adventure.htm
Colossal Cave Adventure — Will Crowther (c1975); Will Crowther and Don Woods (1976)
“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
George Santayana (1863-1952), much much later.
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7rlsy
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Those who don’t learn from pop culture are doomed to spend more money on it.
— Me
😉
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Alawi
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John Smedley was part and parcel of our EQ, our Sony experience and even though he seemed more interested in stuff we weren’t (Planetfall, etc) he was a man with a passion for gaming and it’s obvious by all the familiar faces in Daybreak that he tried to retain as many people as he could.
Seeing familiar faces walk off into the sunset being replaced by corporate clones shouldn’t give us any joys.
We lost Sony, we lost many veteran producers and employees, we lost ingame features, services and forums – it became Daybreak and now Smed is out, what or who exactly will remain from our veteran EQ days?
People shouldn’t find joy in someone like Smed leaving. Long term not in our gaming interests.
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GriffonLady
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For some reason, some people find joy in anything bad happening to someone else. :\ One of many reasons I generally try to avoid people. XD
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Tom
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When I read something about Smedley, there is allways one thing coming up in my mind.
“froglocks are allready in the game”.
I know its very old, but I cant help. I guess its burned in my long term memory ;-P
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Iadien
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I spent weeks looking for the Froglok unlock quest, because he made it seem like the quest was already in game, and we just hadn’t found it yet. That still pisses me off as well. lol
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Maver
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Lol it’s so funny how all the people that never got to know him in person, never got to work with him do know SOOOO much about him.
Sorry but you guys are just making fools of yourselves… I’m prone to believe someone who actually knows him and did work with him. The rest of you armchair CEOs are just jealous that you’re not as successful as he was. Period.
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Chinashop
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Have you met Hitler?
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Feldon
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You think people who have been a customer of the products from this man and heard his promises for 20 years should have no opinion? Only employees and friends should speak? What a unique philosophy of thinking.
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Maver
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Chinashop, thanks for confirming my point.
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Maver
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Everyone can have their opinion, Feldon.
I’m just saying that people don’t know this person, even when they were customers of his products. They don’t know how things come together and how decisions are made. And people often like to criticize decisions without thinking through the consequences , had that decision been made differently.
And people claiming they know better than someone who actually worked with Smed -face to face – are clearly making fools of themselves.
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Tom
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@Maver
he can be a nice boss and all, but that does nothing say anything about him if he made the best decisions for the game/gamers.
I also only speak for eq2 and vanguard, since I dont played the other games.
And I’m really sad about the status of these games.
One is dead and the other I don’t know what to say, maybe ‘milking status’ to get as much money out of it as long as its lasting?
Could it have gotten worse? In one case yes, but it could have been much better, just look at the game which was released at the same time. EQ2 was just not polished enough at release, and for someone who released other mmos before, he should have known better.
And still after so many years the UI has still annoying bugs/features like forgetting settings, ok you can make a macro to load the correct settings and press it after each login, but its annoying!! And I’m sure there are others as well, this is just the one I rememberd first since I had it every second login on most toons ( and I tried a lot to fix it).
The whole UI just feels very old and outdated when I login after playing other games for a while.
I have no cristall ball and I may not know the consequences if other decisions had been made, but I say the game could have been more polished and successful at release. Other companys have prooven that.
It actually took too long to fix the most annoying bugs/balancing of classes from the release.
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Hoot
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Tbh, Vanguard wouldn’t even gotten out of the door had it not been for Smedley. That game was so bad that MS dropped funding it immediately before Smedley put it on life support since he was best friends with Brad McMethhead.
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