At last week's E3, Carolyn Koh sat down with the folks from Sony Online Entertainment to talk about their upcoming children's MMORPG Free Realms.

Free Realms is SoE's entry into the children's MMORPG market. It has a whimsical, modern look that hearkens back to Anime style graphics and is a unique look created by SoE artists, and based on numerous focus tests with age appropriate children. The title reflects the design philosophy behind the game, that children will be free to play the game any way they like. Every game play style is valid and you do not need to level your character in any prescribed way.

So what is there to do in Free Realms? There is combat, mini-games, simulation, such as pets and housing - similar to Animal Crossing play, and social play which involves community participation via a website with an interface similar to Facebook's look.

Check out the article here.

You know Jon, there's this thing called sleep...

cant find this game on the list...

I did just hit my head and feel quite ill tho lol.

Sounds like a nifty little diversion even if your not a kid but where have I heard that word "focus group" before?

Hmm, SOE, I see a fail comming.........

Great, I can get my kid addicted on MMOs as he is entering kindergarten. Not exactly a goal I have for my son.

Sadly, I'm sure there will be a ton of parents who will let their kids become zombies in front of the computer at a tender age of 6.

<p>I like the look and the minigames and diversity. Might be an interesting thing besides my "mature" mmorpgs. :)</p>

Originally posted by chop3593

Hmm, SOE, I see a fail comming.........

lol....i totally agree! I sense failure coming with the $OE tag. $OE now wants to take money from parents cause they know they cant make a decent mainstream mmo.

Originally posted by chop3593

Hmm, SOE, I see a fail comming.........

Actually it sounds like it'll be their best game.  Hell, it sounds better than a lot of other new MMO's coming out.  All this time spent demanding a sandbox and the one we're getting is aimed at children.  How nice.

If they market this thing right I smell a WoW Killer.

Some honest questions:

I played a SOE game where pets were very important.  Out of the blue, all pets in the game were rendered completely inaccesible by SOE because they decided to change the game mid-stream to appeal to a different target audience.  Adults were devastated as they looked at virtual pets they raised and trained over a two year period.  They could still see them in their datapads, but could no longer call or interact with them.  Imagine if this was a bunch of little kids.  Some of them were, in fact, but the player demographic was generally older.  Since John Smedley did this to us adults, in all honesty why would we allow our kids to play one of his games with virtual pets?

I also played a SOE game that advertised an unlockable profession.  People got very excited about this, and spent a lot of time and energy achieving this unlock.  Then SOE removed most of the exiciting features for this unlockable profession, and made it available to everyone without having to do the unlock quests etc..  If John Smedley did that to us adults, why would I allow my children to play one of his games?

In this SOE game that I played, people felt that they were fed information that led them to pay additional subscription fees for advertised features.  After the money was received, these features were removed from the game.  If John Smedly did this to us adults, why would we trust that he would not manipulate our children to have them bothering us to give SOE money for the additional content and trading cards?  Even after we might pay for the additional content, how could we trust that SOE wouldn't change it out from under our kids, after receiving our cash? 

Before my experience with Mr. Smedley and SOE, I would never have thought to ask these questions.  Now that I've see how they operate though, I feel they need to be asked.

Originally posted by ArcAngel3

Well said!

Sounds like Sony found a new cow to milk.

Nintendo won't be please.

eh, let em tap that market.  didn't disney try to make an MMO for kids too and it failed in 2-3 years?

What will the PvP be like is what i want to know? Ha. 

the ending of the trailer shows pvp LMAO - acorn did some massive dps there

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jloGY75bBo

So by the looks of it SOE seems capable to produce a diverse MMO, but then my question why ain't they really doing this with the more mature MMO's, cause most of them are dumped down, now not in the sense some people try to want to make you believe, but overall most more adult oriented MMORPG have been sort of dumped down to please the instant gratification type of player, yet seeing this child's game it seems to offer more the many of current crop of MMORPG's are offering.............WHY?.

Anyway even thought the possibility in this game afcourse it doesn't appeal to me, but I would like this type of game structure to be seen with more MMORPG for the "adult" community.

Originally posted by xxlilDevilxx

Originally posted by chop3593

Hmm, SOE, I see a fail comming.........

 

lol....i totally agree! I sense failure coming with the $OE tag. $OE now wants to take money from parents cause they know they cant make a decent mainstream mmo.

Typical troll.

Everquest 2 is a decent mainstream... actually rated higher then World of Warcraft...  I highly enjoy EQ2... but what do I know, I like SOE.  *GASP*

soe saved mxo, saved vanguard, eq2 is good and eq is good.  they admitted the mistake with nge so they are OK in my book as well

Originally posted by local93bc

If they market this thing right I smell a WoW Killer.

What are you talking about...this is a WoW clone all the way.  Has the same depth of gameplay I'm sure.

Originally posted by Kyleran

Originally posted by local93bc

If they market this thing right I smell a WoW Killer.

 

What are you talking about...this is a WoW clone all the way.  Has the same depth of gameplay I'm sure.

A bunch of kids running around using their parents credit card to get access to the game? 

"""What are you talking about...this is a WoW clone all the way.  Has the same depth of gameplay I'm sure.

"""""".

Well I know they are targueting the same oddience.

My initial response when I saw the small advert for this game on the mmorpg.com home page was "Oh a kiddies mmo.....well that will just be a simplified version of any other mmo with bad graphics. Its just gonna be crap".

Then I read more about it and found that actually it offers MORE than any of the other mmos currently out! What the hell is going on?! I'm sick to death of all the brain dead, repetitive & unimaginative crap that currently seems to capture the minds of millions and then along comes another one that has everything all of those games have and........its aimed at young children!!!! Surely you can see the point that SOE is making right?

Its pretty funny that adults take games like WoW, EQ2, Vanguard and others seriously when Free Realms has pretty much the same level of complexity. It says everything about the average online gamer really doesnt it.

The existence of Free Realms simply confirms the extremely low standards that mmos have reached. Also I think the way that SOE is grooming young children to become brain dead level grinders is disgusting. They are setting them up so that later in life they have more customers to play their level grinding garbage games.

The terrible thing is that it will work.

Originally posted by Reklaw

So by the looks of it SOE seems capable to produce a diverse MMO, but then my question why ain't they really doing this with the more mature MMO's, cause most of them are dumped down, now not in the sense some people try to want to make you believe, but overall most more adult oriented MMORPG have been sort of dumped down to please the instant gratification type of player, yet seeing this child's game it seems to offer more the many of current crop of MMORPG's are offering.............WHY?.

Anyway even thought the possibility in this game afcourse it doesn't appeal to me, but I would like this type of game structure to be seen with more MMORPG for the "adult" community.

Why they've decided on a free to play/pay to play model was addressed by Mr. Smedley in a recent interview.  If I remember correctly, he was impressed with the success of Runescape.
 

So, it looks like once again he has seen another company's success with a particular model, and he intends to emulate it with the hope of achieving similar results.

He also talked about free to play games with cash options like RMT loot or trading cards.  I believe he said that people would pay you more money for these things than you might expect.  He seemed to think that RMT and optional content subscriptions could gain more revenue in the long run than a standard monthly subscription fee model.

The impression I got from his comments was that again this is all about finding the magic target audience and the magic business model to maximize revenue.  I'm sure that makes sense to him.  It also makes sense to me, but it's a very two dimensional plan.

The missing dimensions include things like excellent quality assurance.  Simply speaking, the game should work well.  It should also include excellent customer service.  On the rare occasion that something goes wrong, the service provider should be courteous, respond quickly and help the customer find a solution to the problem.  This is not what SOE is known for in my experience.  Next, communication about the service should be absolutely honest and accurate.  No games, no deception, no manipulation, no bait and switch etc.  Once again, SOE doesn't seem to have a good reputation for these things.

My advice to Mr. Smedley would be to change his focus.  If he really wants to be successful, he needs to put his customers' experience much higher on his list of priorities.  Once he has done this, I think he'll find a way to address QA issues, customer service and marketting.  As long as he keeps searching for the magic business formula with the ideal target audience (to the exclusion of more important factors), he's going to miss the whole point of an MMO, an entertaining experience for the customer.

For example, wouldn't it be cool if he just thought one day, "What kind of gaming experience would really be fun and exciting for kids?  Let's build that.  Of course if we do a good job, we'll be duly compensated with an excellent revenue source, but this is really about kids having fun."   Really that would be fantasitic wouldn't it?   When I read his responses in interviews, however, this really just doesn't seem to be where he's coming from.

My advice to SOE at this point would be to ensure their management team has priorities and strategies that lend themselves to customer satisfaction and long term success.  If this doesn't seem to be the case, well something needs to change.

Smedlys job isn't to make games, it's to make money. Money which keep the 100's of employee's at SOE from having to be out of work. While making games is fun and creative, it takes millions of dollars and investors want the song and dance, reassurance their money, time and patience will be rewarded after the 3-4+ years it takes to make an MMO. Smed doesn’t decide what’s in the game, the developers do. If the game is tanking it's not Smeds fault it's the developers and Smedly does what he can to salvage the game so it continues to make a revenue and support future projects.