Sony Online Entertainment Partners with Perpetual Entertainment

[fernsho]

From the GamerGod article (http://www.gamergod.com/article.php?article_id=3984&fansite_id=461):

Today has been a most exciting day with the announcement of Sony Online Entertainment Platform Publishing as our Co-publisher for “Gods & Heroes” and a complete re-launch of our website! I know that I have talked about Publisher/Studio relationships before in previous posts, but with this announcement, I feel that it is important to let you know how this relationship will affect you, the players of Gods & Heroes.
Editor's Note - Thanks to GamerGod (http://www.gamergod.com).

While this will make many people happy, it stands to reason this news will certainly drive away as many customers as well.

[ElectricMonk]

I had never heard of Gods and Heroes before this but it does look strangely compelling.

the graphics do anything but scream 'next gen' though.

[Sensei-X]

It will make many people happy, all 3 of them. SOE is to online games, as Electronic Arts is to game developers in general, an evil blood-sucking leech.

[ChamberX]

I may very well be handing over petrol to the flamers, but why is SOE so bad?

[Sensei-X]

I may very well be handing over petrol to the flamers, but why is SOE so bad?

Lousy customer service, slow response to customer concerns, charging for expansions which are more like bug-fixes in disguise, etc.

[ninjadan]

I'd like to point out that SOE is NOT handling anything for this game EXCEPT putting it on store shelves. People are so quick to get fired up about SOE's involvement. If I understand correctly, Perpetual is handling all their own support, customer service, and game internally.

[Demo_Boy]

umm what screenshots?

unless you are talking about horizons, which is not the same game.

[Heretic Machine]

Lousy customer service, slow response to customer concerns, charging for expansions which are more like bug-fixes in disguise, etc.

Sounds a lot like Blizzard to me. But yes, SoE sucks too.

[Wyrm]

The difference is, Blizzard games are actually fun to play...

If SOE has nothing to do with development, then this actually might turn out nicely.

[bean19]

I had Gods & Heroes pegged as vaporware. Kind of glad to see it getting published at all. How they do on this game will be interesting because it will determine the amount of investors they will have for Star Trek Online.

Check out the current videos. Their old screenshots are terrible, but the newer videos are actually fairly impressive. One thing that stood out to me is that there was one character who performed a grappling attack against a mob. He actually grabbed a minotaur and threw it to the ground. . . My guess is that it probably only works against humanoids, but that's still damn impressive.

[bobbler]

Sounds a lot like Blizzard to me. But yes, SoE sucks too.

That got me thinking... I haven't really seen any MMO with "good" service really. They all kind of suck in that department (more or less -- you're inevitably going to have a problem sooner or later and GMs are inevitably going to be too slow... and theres always going to be bugs, etc).

[Wyrm]

Think about the number of people playing WoW though. If they have bad service, it's because of the amount of players. Sony probably has less than 100k players, whereas blizz had something like 5 million? Yeah, you cant really compare the two.

[Heretic Machine]

I haven't really seen any MMO with "good" service really.

CoH/CoV has pretty good service, in my experience... Though the devs are pretty stupid in their decisions.

[GunJ]

I haven't really seen any MMO with "good" service really.

Doesn't EVE Online have decent support ?

[bean19]

CoH/CoV has pretty good service, in my experience... Though the devs are pretty stupid in their decisions.

Yeah. Blizzard's customer service when the game launched and they didn't yet have MILLIONS of customers, was excellent too.

Blizzard just hasn't used all their gobs and gobs of money to scale up their base correctly. The damn game is still growing, and will undoubtedly gain users with the upcoming expansion.

They actually need to open up even more realms and hire even more customer service staff.

The wild success of WoW is just amazing.

[Heretic Machine]

Oh, just so I'm not being uber-negative, the game does sound pretty bad-ass.