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One full year of being a Champion
If you read about Champions Online in its first days, you would not have thought of it as a triple-A title. The game was full of bugs, the community management was not the best, and it just seemed like the devs were intent on shoveling out more broken stuff that barely worked. I think that, in particular, the first three or four months were the worst. If you were to go back in time and ask me about whether or not I thought CO would make it to its first anniversary, my response would have been: "Maybe, but it'll be bleeding subs if it even makes it that far." Since then, a lot of things have changed. I talked about the first six months of CO, but it's been a full year since that painful launch day patch. I'm not sure I'm even playing the same game anymore.
Happy first birthday Free Realms!
As the song goes -- It's Your World -- and one year later, the team at Sony Online Entertainment have shown that to be true by adding requested content like pets, mounts, player housing, and games like soccer and pirate ship battles! Now, one year after initial launch, Free Realms has crossed the 10 million registered player mark, and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon as they prepare to head into their second awesome year. By way of thanking their community for incredible growth -- and fun -- in the last year, the team behind Free Realms plans to celebrate by throwing a series of parties all day today! Starting at 9 AM Pacific and going until 5 PM Pacific time, various SOE employees will log in to the game for a series of games of "Ambassador Hide and Seek" wherein one employee will hide, and another will emcee the party and give players hints as to where they can find that particular Ambassador. SOE has also opened up the option to pick up Station Cash through PayPal and SMS (text message), making it even easier than before. In addition, they're adding new items to the store like tints for the beetle pet, and offering other items on sale like the Red Balloon Animal pet. If that's not enough, they've additionally given us 10 codes for Station Cash Cards worth 1000 Station Cash each ($10 USD value each). If you'd like to get your hands on one of these, simply leave a comment (only one per person) to this post before 8am ET April 30th, 2010 telling us your favorite addition to Free Realms in the last year. We'll select 10 random winners from the comments tomorrow morning. Contest is open to legal residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding Quebec) who are 18 and older. You find the complete Joystiq network contest rules here. There's also a shiny new "yearbook" video touching on some of the fun events of the last year that we've embedded behind the break for you. It's been one heck of a year, and we here at Massively would like to wish the Free Realms team many more years of fantastic fun! [Edit: Comments are now closed. Winners will be contacted soon.]
