Polygon.com: Excerpts of John Smedley letter — Tried to Avoid Layoffs For Past Year
From Polygon.com:
In a company-wide email that was forwarded to Polygon, Sony Online president John Smedley expressed intense distaste for having to lay off employees, calling it a “horrible, sickening experience.” According to Smedley, while many of the company’s games are performing well, layoffs were necessary to bring expenses in line with revenue.
“For the past year we’ve done everything possible to avoid this situation,” said Smedley. “We rightfully should have done this nearly a year ago but we have been fighting very hard to keep this from happening.”
“I know most of the people we’re laying off today. Some of them have been with us here since the beginning. None of them deserved this,” he said. “Our goal as a company needs to be to make incredible games and grow again so we can bring our friends back.”
Trackback from your site.
Comments (35)
Upside
| #
Ridiculous.
Sounds like they’re cutting anyone worth a damn. They’re putting too much hope in a game for casuals that’s going to end up in the same state as EQ and EQ2 except the bonus of getting to that point a lot faster.
Also, your post on Flames scared the living [bleep] out of me.
Reply
Kruzzen
| #
If you have ever been in a position of leadership you know that layoffs suck. They are emotionally draining and very hard on everyone. I do not envy anyone on either side that has to go through this. For all the faults that SOE has I don’t think they wanted to have to do this. Doesn’t make it any easier and only time will tell if they made the right choice.
Reply
Feldon
| #
Maybe they should stop fumbling pre-production and product launches. FreeRealms, Agency, EQNext.
Reply
Seffrid
| #
I wonder if this would have been necessary if they hadn’t driven so many of their loyal and veteran European players away from their various games due to the wretched deal with ProSieben?
The first rule of any business is to look after your existing customers, something SOE have always had problems comprehending when looking to dumb down everything from their games to their customer relations in the search for that elusive extra customer.
Reply
Murfalad
| #
So far I can’t really fault Prosieben, admitedly they have mostly worked on DCUO and PS2, but the physical box they put together for distribution in Europe impressed the heck out of me. And they came over well with the people they brought over to the SOE Lives.
If they did the same for EQ2 it would definitely improve things, as while digital downloads are popular the high street sales do give a game a lot of free advertising.
Plus they had excellent free beer, sauerkraut and Sausages at their SOE Live panel this year 😀
Reply
Gravy
| #
I wonder how much profit they are making on EQ? EQ1 that is.
Maybe SoE would be better served by focusing on the fantasy realm. They could sell off/license Planetside and DCUO. Forget about those silly other games that no one bothers with: Dragon Prophet, Wizardry, etc. Stop development of EQ and go into maintain. Then put the rest of the talent on EQ2 and EQN.
ArenaNet seems to be focused on the Guild Wars franchise. CCP had stayed focus with Eve and recently Dust. Maybe SoE should focus on EQ.
Reply
Seffrid
| #
I should perhaps clarify that, on reflection, I’d have preferred to have said “customer management” rather than “customer relations” – Feldon, please edit the comment and remove this one if you get the chance. I do have respect for SOE’s customer relations staff who operate under constantly difficult conditions/instructions and didn’t mean to insult them.
Reply
bhagpuss
| #
Maybe they just aren’t all that good at all that stuff. Most companies aren’t. You can probably name most of the ones that are because doing it well is so rare we all notice it when we see it.
Selling an idea is a difficult enough task for professionals who specialize in the art of convincing others but when, as almost all MMO companies do, the people who make the games are also tasked with promoting and selling them then why is anyone surprised it’s done amateurishly and ineffectually?
Reply
Seffrid
| #
@bhagpuss: Because they justify part of their charges by the fact that they employ trained marketing departments?
As an example, check out the original EQ2 manual credits. It shows a Senior Vice President of Sales, a Vice President of Marketing, a Product Marketing Manager, a Marketing Coordinator, and a Sales and Marketing Team of 11 people. I’m sure that other companies are the same, and while a good many of those employees will be long gone (and in any event covered more than EQ2, which has never received any significant promotion or marketing), we shouldn’t fall into the trap of believing that coders and designers are also responsible for promoting and selling their games. Other people are employed to do that.
The trouble these days is that all the (potential) customer contact is done through the social media which only a fragment of the potential playerbase actually uses, and independent sites which not a lot more visit. How many MMO players who haven’t already committed to SOE games “follow” John Smedley on Twitter or frequent Reddit – which are the only two places you’ll come across Smed at first hand. You won’t find him promoting his company’s games on their websites or official forums.
Game companies these days rely primarily on “viral marketing” – ie word of mouth between gamers – which is great when something like WoW enthuses people but is far from great when something like the ProSieben deal hits the fan.
Perhaps it’s time for companies to rebuild their sales and marketing teams!
Reply
Atan
| #
Sadly they for the most part can only blame themselves. Many decisions over the past 3 years have driven players from the game. They’ve removed way too much treadmiling in EQ2 and dumbed 90% of the game down to a solo at max level experience.
Over rewarding extreme solo playstyles has greatly killed the treadmilling and gear progression in the game. People bore and move on faster than they ever have.
Reply
Loch
| #
We’re using the word “treadmill” to describe desirable game design now?
I’m well aware that games use certain methods to keep players playing, but I’m perfectly all right with removing the “treadmill” from a game and replacing it with something fun. (Not claiming that’s what was done in EQ2).
Reply
Feldon
| #
Atan,
That’s a pretty low blow considering the Challenge Duo content was entirely built, tested, and delivered for top-end raiders. Despite strong feelings from SmokeJumper against much time being spent on raids, the team had been delivering more and more raid content, and planned to totally go nuts for this expansion. I mean Temple of Veeshan. How do you not go nuts with raid content there?
Reply
Zizzu
| #
EQ2 has been dying the last 3+ years. SoE pretty much “mucked” up itemization and class balancing. All I see now is items that are overloaded with stats that it really makes no sense. Certain classes are pretty much ignored and useless in raids (Maybe that has changed, but it was pretty bad several years ago). Currently, content is most revolving around raiding. Kinda hard to obtain new players when everyone else is pretty much heads above everyone else. Seriously, how does a new person even get into a raiding guild these days when requirements are just out of reach (IE: Max AA’s, gear, etc…)?
Reply
Cleve
| #
It appears that Sony Online president, John Smedley, needs to cut his salary to bring “expenses more in line with revenue.” Perhaps working for one dollar a year will make the Sony Online management more hungry to put out stellar entertainment.
Reply
anon
| #
This
Reply
Brakepiston
| #
I used to work for a division of a large multi national company. My division was profitable, but when the parent company caught a cold, everyone in the whole organization had to cut back and lay off people. Maybe SOE is doing fine, but the layoffs are being forced upon them by Sony Corporation as part of a total organization shake up? We know that Sony has struggled recently with losses in the PC, Camcorder, digital camera and TV markets. I’m not sure how console sales are doing these days.
I feel sorry for anyone that loses a job through no fault of their own. I’ve been downsized twice in my 30 years in the workforce and it’s never pleasant for anyone. All I know is that it’s better when it happen quickly without the “Sword of Damocles” above your head for weeks and months.
Reply
Atan
| #
Feldon,
What is killing EQ2 is the complete lack of things to do outside of raid times. I have no issue with the raid content, it was the destruction of gear progression outside of raiding the past 18 months or so that has diminished players engagement with the game.
When so many people are not logging in outside of raid times, it doesn’t take long till their raiding hits a wall and they lose interest in logging in at all.
There is almost no incentive to form a pug in the game, and its been that way since COE launched and the team has done little to nothing to address it.
As far as the other users comment on treadmilling, RPGs are heavily based on treadmilling, its what keeps people playing. Players are looking for that grind to a reward. As much as they complaint about it, its the thing that keeps them coming back year after year. As soon as they have nothing to work towards and they don’t feel they are capable of getting the next ‘thing’ they quit logging in.
Reply
Feldon
| #
The original intention for the expansion was to put desirable, rare items back in group zones. Who knows what will happen now.
Reply
Kruzzen
| #
I disagree about people coming back for the treadmill. There is content out there that only .01 % of the population can even get to at this point and they are still quitting. The game swings back and forth on a pendulum as to where the loot is coming from. It is a delicate balancing act with so many cogs that SOE can’t keep track of them all anymore. It is because of this that some items come out way over powered and other are a joke.
Then when they come back and nerf stuff that people tried so hard for people get upset and quit. A solid balance of gear throughout the game without nerfing things a year or more down the road would be a nice improvement to the game.
You will always have your top tier people get bored quickly as they already have stuff that is so powerful that new content can’t be strong enough for them without demolishing the other 99% of the population.
At this point I see them using EQ2 as a test bed for EQ Next. Heck look at the new class. That is 100% a test case for classes in EQ Next.
Guess time will tell what things look like next xpac and how many come back and how many leave.
Still think EQ2 is the best in class of all the MMO’s out there.
Reply
Atan
| #
I know the intention of the next xpac, soe’s problem is waiting whole xpacs to fix issues. Simply put most people don’t hang around that long for a fix.
They’ve got some good content at both bookends of the player spectrum with nothing in between.
Content releases like SG only disenfranchise players. The difficulty of the non challenge encounters was way wrong and out of reach of 75% of the raiding population and folks like Gninja refused to see the problem with content that wasn’t accessible by enough players.
Reply
Snowdarc
| #
^ That
Reply
Hoot
| #
Laying people off is a very common day experience to the average developer in the video game industry. The dreaded pink slip is always going to happen after the major release of a video game as the developers/publishers cut the remaining and unnecessary employees. This includes MMO devs. Is this unfair and incompetent? Yes it is. Is it only a problem SoE is facing? Absolutely not.
Reply
Caldwell
| #
EQ2 started dying once smokejumper came on board. The guy is an incompetent tool. The final nail on the head was when it went free to play.
Reply
Caldwell
| #
*final nail in the coffin. Got a mixed metaphor.
Reply
Snowdarc
| #
It has gotten to the point where I am seriously considering letting my acct lapse. And I’ve been here since 2005.
Reply
Betony
| #
The number of former sub players who now post smack with their F2P+5 accounts is quite amusing. Haven’t been over to the game’s forums, the one that went full F2P recently, for a while. Read they closed a complete office and laid off staff too. Lay offs are industry wide yet folks here and on the official forums just love to trash SOE.
Reply
Frank
| #
But F2P has created huge revenue growth, just listen to Smedley sometime. He’s been preaching F2P since 2005, shortly after EQ2 launched, talking about an unnamed project that would shake up the industry. Of course he was speaking of Free Realms.
It’s not like this is the first round of SOE layoffs, but when games go months or longer without bugfixes, such as PS2 which is now on a content hiatus as they try to get it working on typical hardware, and historically EQ2, the perception of their asset allocation is pretty poor.
Reply
alawi
| #
I like Smedley but his problem is, the things he’s excited about (Free Realms, The Agency, Planetside 2 for example) the core player base is Not Excited About.
Reply
slow_deep_n_hard
| #
Many many failures in any business is going too far into risky investment in a high competition market. Fact is, they are working on to many different games. Instead of spitting out expansions to pay for new game production it should be used for current game improvements eq2 is by far perfect in design but with a simple server duplication revamp the game with a new graphics engine and graphical revamp it would have been top of the market just from content alone, eq2 has potential to be the greatest but bad leadership looking at the competitions formats instead of looking ahead a what no one has.
Reply
Feldon
| #
SOE has reduced the number of games they are working on. EQNext is really their main project right now. Dragon’s Prophet and these other games were outside companies. Blizzard is the only company that can succeed with 2-3 games. Everyone else has to have 8-10.
The EQ2 team had a lead designer who looked to WoW for everything. He is no longer on the EQ2 team as of 2 years ago.
Reply
Frank
| #
Couldn’t blame him for looking to WoW, Smedley in interviews talked about how he enjoyed playing that with his kids. Seemed rather telling that the man running the place preferred a competitor.
Reply
badcat
| #
I feel bad for the folks laid off. I been in that boat one to many times on both sides the one getting laid off or the one doing it.
So now we lost gosh who knows what. From what I understand we lost several folks from eq2. So that begs the question of whats next.
I know that I play on Guk server. All the large raiding guilds are constantly spamming were looking for new players. The reason is most folks are at burnout. Cobalt Scare was designed for the top 1% of raiders, most raid guilds have only killed trash in there. The rest of the time it is HE, AOA, ST, and POS, and POA.
This does not bode well for the xpac headed our way. Folks are hungry for new content, we been doing coe stuff for way to long. Lots of folks want to raid, but not at the level of the top 1% of guilds.
Oh well, and I am probably the only one person who looked at EQNEXT and got sick to my stomach at how silly the toon artwork looked.
I wonder whats going to happen to vanguard, I bet they are next on the chopping block.
Reply
Aaen
| #
EQNext looks like it has some neat and innovative systems going into that game but I agree, I can’t overlook the godawful artwork… everything is WAY too oversized and out of proportion for my tastes.
Reply
Aaen
| #
Edit: I also hope Vanguard doesn’t get the axe. I do enjoy logging in every now and then. 🙂
Reply
Trueflight
| #
“We rightfully should have done this nearly a year ago but we have been fighting very hard to keep this from happening.”
Someone should remind him that they did do this a year ago.. and the year before, and the year before that. Almost like clockwork every year a month or so after Fan Faire they have layoffs.
Reply