John Smedley hired by Amazon to produce MMOs

Ok I am on board with the "stop recycling these same names over and over again in this business". It's like hiring a failed coach time after time (hello Rex Ryan). Actually the more I think about it the Smed = Rex Ryan comparison has merit. Anyways.

If you're a company that wants to get into the business of producing a MMO and you're not one of the small handful of established studios how exactly do you go about finding the right person to lead your Dev team? The Brads and Smeds get rehired despite a laundry list of failures, because they have SOME history of success. It's less risky? I don't know.

Genuinely trying to understand what name(s) or hiring action would make you guys react positively if hired on to develop a MMO, because I don't know myself.

Mr Creed said:

I don't expect anything from Smed, and I doubt any future MMOs would amount to anything. However, is the quoted part actually fact, just conjecture, or even made up? I could believe it if you just mean the time EQ spent on life support but still made expansions, but that was post-WoW and EQ was a footnote at that point. I thought EQ did pretty well for 4 years in both box sales and subs.

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The term "post-WoW" should be more defined since that could mean any time beyond 2004 when it launched. Yes, many left EQ in 2004 as evidenced by the drop in subs but that does not mean EQ instantly become some footnote. I don't recall the numbers but even if EQ subs were cut in half, that's still 200-250K subs they had in pocket by the end of 2004. Even if it was a bit lower than that, at $13/mo per sub, that's still well north of $2M per month in subs revenue they had to protect. Yet Smed continued to favor quantity over quality in everything he touched while WoW took the opposite approach.

I maintain that had Smed took a different approach and poured more resources into EQ instead of re-dploying them in the numerous EQ successors way before they needed to, the EQ franchise could have been significantly more successful even to this day.

Hindsight is 20/20 and I'm sure there are facets to this that I'm not aware of that influenced some of his decisions. However, once I saw what he did with Hero's Song, it absolutely screams of some of the same critical mistakes I saw happen with EQ over the years. The common denominator being Smed himself.

PatrickStar said:

If you're a company that wants to get into the business of producing a MMO and you're not one of the small handful of established studios how exactly do you go about finding the right person to lead your Dev team? The Brads and Smeds get rehired despite a laundry list of failures, because they have SOME history of success. It's less risky? I don't know.

Genuinely trying to understand what name(s) or hiring action would make you guys react positively if hired on to develop a MMO, because I don't know myself.

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Depends on the type of MMO you're trying to make and the target audience that you have in mind for it. For example, if I'm interested in making a game like BDO, then I'm clearly not looking to hire someone like Brad or any of the older re-treads in the industry. That kind of game demands younger, more artistic minds and leadership to pull off successfully. And given how huge the gaming industry has become in the last 5-10 years, I'm guessing there is no shortage of qualified people to fit the bill.

Having said that, I think there's still a place for guys like Brad to develop successful, more niche-oriented MMOs that appeal to a smaller gamer audience provided the expectations are set properly up front in terms of creative direction, revenue goals, profit margins, etc. There were many issues at Sigil but I believe a major part of Vanguard's failure was Brad over-estimating these key areas. Couple that with the increase in gamers' expectations for what they were willing to tolerate in the games they were paying to play and it all completely blew up in their face.

I put Brad and Smed in different categories though. For most of their time together, I believe Brad worked for Smed. His only real failure that I recall is Vanguard. Meanwhile, Smed's list of failures and underperformers is quite the laundry list indeed.

mkopec said:

As to the people and leadership, I thiink the problem is that I think the gaming industry is small, and all the good people are gobbled up quickly. I dont think there is many CEO/Producer types out there, and if they are they get snatched up. This is why we keep seeing the same names over and over. Not saying the dude cant run production or lead people, I just think creative shit like games, you need more than business type level leadership.

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Small? The video game industry is billions per year in revenue. There are now dozens of platforms to develop games for. Colleges and universities now offer degrees and curriculums in video game development.

There's tons of proof showing the industry has exploded in the last 10 years and shows no signs of slowing down, which is enough of a selling point to attract qualified leadership from other industries depending on the project.

I don't know if EQ subs were cut in half by early 2015, which kinda gets back to my question. Your point seems to be that EQ could have remained a competitor if they had stuck with it. I feel like I disagree with that and would guess they dropped to 20% or less by mid-2015. But I don't have any numbers and feels data is worthless. That's why asked about the facts behind your statement about EQ1 revenue.

mkopec said:

I will never know why create a game that competes with one of your own, lol) Instead of EQ2, they should of upgraded EQ with new engine and continued to spend at least 80% of their resources on their bread and butter.

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That's definitely true. But it also means the decision to relegate EQ1 to the back of the shelf was made years before WoW. Imagine a world without WoW where EQ2 is actually a success, what was the plan there? Shut down EQ1 in 2006? Or keep it limping along just like they actually did?

Mr Creed said:

I don't know if EQ subs were cut in half by early 2015, which kinda gets back to my question. Your point seems to be that EQ could have remained a competitor if they had stuck with it. I feel like I disagree with that and would guess they dropped to 20% or less by mid-2015. But I don't have any numbers and feels data is worthless. That's why asked about the facts behind your statement about EQ1 revenue.

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Have no idea on the validity or accuracy of the data, but if it's correct, it looks like the subs took a nose dive in 2005.

sorry, that was a typo.....i know what you meant.

Mr Creed said:

Your point seems to be that EQ could have remained a competitor if they had stuck with it. I feel like I disagree with that and would guess they dropped to 20% or less by mid-2015.

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You make it sound like because they weren't able to compete with WoW, EQ dropped to nothing, which is clearly not true. The chart posted above is what I recalled and shows EQ subs still in the 200K range. That may be close to a third of it's peak prior to WoW and is a fraction of what WoW did, but everyone knew that EQ had a much lower cap than WoW did. The bottom line is it was still significant revenue that leadership could've used to their advantage.

Smed was leadership. He didn't.

Mr Creed said:

That's definitely true. But it also means the decision to relegate EQ1 to the back of the shelf was made years before WoW. Imagine a world without WoW where EQ2 is actually a success, what was the plan there? Shut down EQ1 in 2006? Or keep it limping along just like they actually did?

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That's my whole point. They saw WoW coming and knew the technological mess they had with EQ. So they decided to "hurry up" and create a platform in EQ2 that could (in theory) compete with WoW from a technology standpoint, knowing full well that it would also bleed their own cash cow in EQ1 at the same time. It might've been different had they released EQ2 as a polished and tech-stable game, but it was exactly the opposite, which only exacerbated their problems.

Again, Smed was in charge of these decisions. The fault lies on him.

That graph makes me sad, especially City of Heroes. That could have been a great game but they totally fucked it up.

mkopec said:

Never played H1Z1, but played the shit out of Destiny, and yeah I would definitely consider that a mmorpg, although a light one. Classes, leveling, story, quests, shit to grind, group dungeon instances, raids, PvP instances unique items to acquire including gear sets. I mean its not WoW in breadth and scope, but its sure is a mmorpg on consoles, and pretty popular too. D2 should be coming out at the end of this year/beginning of next year and im all in. The game has also one of the best shooter experiences in any game Ive played. Bungie really dialed that shit in over the last few decades, and it shows.

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I never played destiny myself but watching my brother play it it seemed a lot more like diablo (online but to actually do anything you make a "game" with a small group and actually play the content. I personally don't consider a game an MMO unless it's a consistent world and not just a lobby you can run around in (maybe i'm wrong tho and destiny isn't like that?).

Amazon has boatloads of money. Make something half way interesting and it include the game in my prime membership, then it's a win imo.

And Smed might be a good choice, I don't know. It's very hard to determine where the magic came from that created EQ. Brad was definitely a major part of that, but Smed ran the show. And a whole bunch of other very talented people were also important.

If he gets a good team together and they don't go overboard with the cheese factor, then it might work.

Shonuff said:

Everquest 1 was not a failure. If there was a failure on his part, it's not by reigning in the devs. For years, I'd ask him why this or that dev could make a retarded decision. He'd tell me he was giving them leeway and didn't want to stem creativity. He's really not a bad guy.

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So do you get celebrated at your work from something 18 years ago? He has a much longer history of failures than successes.