A CES interview with SOE CEO John Smedley (pt. 2)

Earlier today we unveiled the first part of our CES interview with SOE's Chief Executive Officer, John Smedley. He announced to us an unprecedented buy-in program for their upcoming free-to-play kids fantasy game Free Realms. This afternoon we have the rest of the interview to share with you, with big news for players who use the company's Station Access pass. While a lot of commentators have been frustrated by price increases, SOE is working behind the scenes to make those increases worth your while.

We are having ongoing discussions inside the company about making station access an all-inclusive pass. Everything that we have, you get as a customer. Station Access subscribers would get every expansion pack for every game, as well as future expansions for every game as well. For the same price now, without raising the price.

Read on for our discussion on why these changes have taken so long to implement, and a few words about the company's rededication to fighting gold farmers.

Massively: To kind of flip back to the other end of the spectrum – Station Access. We'd talked about some plans for that at last year's SOE Gamers day that still seem to be in the works. Is there any chance we could talk about that today?

John Smedley: Sure. I don't mind this being public. We are having ongoing discussions inside the company about making station access an all-inclusive pass. Everything that we have, you get as a customer. Station Access subscribers would get every expansion pack for every game, as well as future expansions for every game as well. For the same price now, without raising the price. We have two problems, though. One: we have third parties involved in this. LucasArts, for example, will have to buy off on this, as would others. Second is the less obvious one: Promising future stuff is the meat of the problem. We haven't found the right way to word things yet. To be honest other priorities have gotten in the way. That's what we want to offer people.

It's really a question of logistics. For example, if a customer buys an expansion pack now, they physically own it. What happens if a customer with Station Access decides they primarily play EverQuest 2 and decide to convert from Station Access to just EQ2. What happens to the expansions they got access to as a part of Station Access? This is somewhat similar to the questions services like Napster has had to deal with. In their model while you're a member of the service you have access to everything, but once you stop it's another story. But for us: what happens to items collected from expansions? It's a difficult question, and we've put a lot of thought into it. We have to make sure that people can't game the system, because you know farmers could have a field day with this.

Massively: I wanted to ask, because while it makes sense that these are tough issues to deal with it's been some time since the rate was raised. I think players have been a bit concerned.

John Smedley: Well, the reason the rate went up has more to do with the number of games on the service. The cost of these games is getting up there. The economics of running MMOs is interesting. We've been running EverQuest for almost nine years now, and people think that some costs like customer service don't go up. Sure they do! We have a lot of long-time employees who need raises over time and the cost of living goes up ... The Station Access thing is something I want to see happen, though. I want to incentivize more people to go into that.

Massively: While we're talking about EverQuest ... I think some players are at the point where they don't understand why you're still running the game? SOE has this reputation for keeping games like Vanguard and Matrix Online going, and we were just talking about the economics. What is it about these games that make them worthwhile to keep them going?

John Smedley: Great subscriber bases for EverQuest and EverQuest 2 and Galaxies, pretty much. I will tell you, I'm as surprised as anyone that the longevity of EverQuest. Our first spreadsheet had this thing running for about two years, and even that we thought was a little optimistic. Nine years later you go, "wow". There's still a large community there. As long as people pay us money and we love what we do, we'll keep running it. The challenge is that, with EverQuest and EverQuest 2 on the shelves together ... why would people want to play a nine-year old game? Honestly the acquisition in EverQuest has slowed down a lot, and it's hard. We've refocused on one expansion a year with these games now, I think we let quality slip too much when we were doing two, and I'm happy with where we are on that. We have a great player base and we're making some money so there's no point in not continuing.

Massively: From what I've seen with Galaxies, where you have a really dedicated team working on it, it seems like you're even gaining a little ground back there.

John Smedley: Galaxies, I have to say, we screwed up with the NGE, but we're very much focused on making the game better and better. I was pleasantly surprised to see Tabula Rasa used a very similar combat system to what you see in Galaxies. If I were to do it again, I never would have done that switchover, but I think the effort we have put in has started to show. It's taken longer than it should have, but the quality level has just skyrocketed. We did this recent house pack-up, and that drove so many people to resubscribe, I was truly surprised by that.

Massively: Earlier you mentioned the problem of farmers with regards to Station Access. I know that's something the company feels very strongly about?

John Smedley: I think the issue of farming is higher on the radar now than it ever has been. The behinds the scenes things are really frustration. A lot of these farmers are essentially stealing from us. What they do is they charge us back all the time. They use a credit card –sometimes stolen, sometimes not – to buy an account key. They use the account for a month, and then they call the credit card company and charge it back. We have suffered nearly a million dollars just in fines over the past six months; it's getting extremely expensive for us. What's happening is that when they do this all the time, the credit card companies come back to us and say "You have a higher than normal chargeback rate, therefore we'll charge you fines on top of that." We're really trying to get on top of that. We're taking our current efforts up about five notches to Defcon 1 on this issue. They bug us even more than they bug our customers, and we're definitely taking steps to implement rigorous anti-farming efforts.

It's actually really amazing to sit and watch these people work. I've personally sat with them as they're tracking a farmer, and you'll see a mob spawn – this guy's got a bot that within half a second has them moving towards the creature even if it's halfway across the zone. It's a serious problem.

Massively: And you can't fight the chargebacks with the credit card companies?

John Smedley: No, and the reason for that is very simple. Visa and MasterCard have these rules about chargebacks, and I personally think they're antiqued. Digital delivery isn't covered by their rules very well. So if you order something from Amazon and pay thirty bucks for a book, if it doesn't show up at your house you can fight it because you can say "I never received that thing." They do not cover that with digital delivery. In my opinion the world has changed a lot and I think that needs to be addressed.

Massively: Is there any sort of collaboration on that subject with other MMO developers?

John Smedley: I have to say "We are in close contact with our friends in the industry."

Massively: Of course. Many thanks, as always, for your time sir.