Both City of Heroes / Villains and LEGO Universe have announced that they are heading towards free-to-play / freemium payment models in the near future. This adds them to a list that has swelled recently to also include Age of Conan and Fallen Earth. This highlights to me perhaps an unexpected impact of the F2P … Continue reading
Filed under MMOs …
Insert Coin To Continue: Perfect World Buys Cryptic Studios
Atari has sold Cryptic Studios to Chinese online game developer Perfect World for €35 million (US$50.5m), pending the final factors of the deal coming together. I’m sure it will, which is why they announced it, so Cryptic’s ownership will be transferred over and thus Cryptic will continue under its third master after NCsoft (sure, not really … Continue reading
The Trials of UnSub: Super Hero Squad Online
Gazillion continues to confuse me. According to some sources SHSO has officially launched and is now taking player money, but there is no big announcement of launch on either publisher Gazillion’s main site or on developer The Amazing Society’s site (but go look at The Amazing Society’s site, because it has a very clever home … Continue reading
It’s Been An Interesting Week
A number of things happened this week in the realm of superhero MMOs. Knowing how much I can write on about things, I’ll try to keep it brief. How Now, Mr Cao? Oh, so childish. But anyway: Chris Cao was rumoured to have left DC Universe Online on DCUO’s own forums, so it would have … Continue reading
SOE Back Up, But Don’t Tell Anyone
So, after being down for almost two weeks, Sony Online Entertainment is back up (in some places, anyway). After a lot of complaints about SOE’s ability to communicate with its customers, here’s a reassuring sign: SOE is bad in communicating with its staff too. I get why any relaunch was quiet: SOE doesn’t want a … Continue reading
Cloudbursting And The Sad Case of Sony Online Entertainment
By now I’m sure you will have heard of Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) being hacked, 77 million account details stolen, Sony Online Entertainment having to go offline and may remain offline until the end of May. And if you haven’t, well, there you go. Bad times to be online at Sony. There are a ton … Continue reading
Gazillion: Marvel Universe Gets Bendis; Suprise! Super Hero Squad Online Launches
Following up from a previous post, the lead writer for Gazillion’s Marvel Universe Online will be written by the prolific Brian Michael Bendis, as expected. What also came out of the event was that the game will be free-to-play, players will play as existing Marvel characters rather than building their own and players will also … Continue reading
The Very, Very Late 2010 MMO Recap: Here Comes the New Stuff, Same As the Old Stuff
(All you have is my word that I haven’t made any substantive revisions to this document since January 30, 2011. Trust me. I’m a blogger. For a point-by-point recap of 2010, see either the January to June or the July to December articles.) 2010 was an interesting year for the MMO industry in that it … Continue reading
The Very, Very Late 2010 MMO Recap (Part 2)
Part 1 is here, including a note about why April is the best time to review what happened about 16 months ago. July: Star Trek Online Executive Producer Craig Zinkievich leaves both the title and Cryptic Studios. Capcom’s Xbox Japan- and Xbox 360-only MMO Monster Hunter Frontier Online tops the sales charts in Japan. Activision … Continue reading
The Very, Very Late 2010 MMO Recap (Part 1)
A Note of Explanation At the end of 2010, I wrote up a recap of the year’s MMO-related events for a particular site, as I’ve done for a few years. Given that it’s now almost May, I don’t think that site is going to use it, but I’m really loathe to throw out all the … Continue reading
World Class Villains 