Originally posted by salvaje

 

Originally posted by Thecensored

Nah, Smed would just start a new company. The guy can't take a hint and just go away....

 

Smed MIGHT get some fool to give him some money to make a MMO, the way his partner Brad did.  But it'd turn out the same. Smed and Brad got lucky with Everquest.  They've never repeated that success since, and SOE finds achieving mediocrity to be beyond them. 

Unfortunately Smed will find another job somewhere.  It seems an unwritten rule amongst executives that once you are "in the club" you keep getting recycled and never have the blame for your failings fall on you.  Look at Carly Fiorina, for example, her "reward" for nearly driving Lucent into bankruptcy was to be hired as CEO of HP.  They finally got rid of her before HP suffered the same fate as Lucent and have turned it around and now are beating Dell in terms of sales...

So, yeah, Smed will get hired somewhere.

 

Originally posted by zymurgeist

If you were going into the MMORPG market in a big way why the hell would you buy SoE? It's an dead albatross.

 It has a good spread of games - all it needs is for one of them to be taken up by, say, 0.5% of the Indian population for, say, the equivalent of $5 a month subs and that's an instant $75m a year.

umm, SOE and the Smedster can deny everything till the cows come home, it means nothing. It isn't SOE selling SOE, it's Sony Corp selling SOE and I have yet to see a denial or disclamer from Sony Corp.

On top of that, Sony would have multiple reasons, both legal and logical to NOT inform anyone at SOE about the possible sale of that division. SO, whether the Smedster actually is telling the truth as he knows it or is lying, nothing is even close to official untill Sony does a press release about this and even then I think they would have to lie since something like this can affect their stocks.

Originally posted by hubertgrove

Originally posted by zymurgeist

If you were going into the MMORPG market in a big way why the hell would you buy SoE? It's an dead albatross.

 It has a good spread of games - all it needs is for one of them to be taken up by, say, 0.5% of the Indian population for, say, the equivalent of $5 a month subs and that's an instant $75m a year.

By moving the entire company to India firing all the current programmers to supposedly save money and starting from what would be worse than scratch with an existing code base you have no experience with?  Why wouldn't you start with a new game and a new company tailored to your target audience? Not to mention  you're going to lose many if not most of your current subscribers in the ensuing chaos.

Originally posted by jayheld90

anyway, why would he care about "damage control" as it were. if they were going to can him, and they actually were doing this, he wouldnt bother to tell everyone it wasnt true. i cant believe it one way or the other, but we will see in time.

Two reasons, pride and self denile

Originally posted by TheChronic

 the most funny thing is john smedley's reply to the takeover:

"We aren't for sale and never have been. Nothing like this has ever been discussed with the Zapak guys. The truth is we were talking to them about distribution rights to one of our games. And we have no idea how this story got started."

they have no idea how the story got started, just like the have no idea of what your player base enjoys, right john ?

maybe you have an idea if you look at your current subscription numbers for star wars galaxies and compare them to pre-cu/ pre-NGE hm ?

John Smedley reminds me of this guy:

"there is no combat upgrade, there is no NGE, SWG is doin fine and there is no takeover !!!11 1 1..."

 

Haha, I miss Bagdad Bob   Let's see if Smed has the same balls Bagdad Bob did and give himself up (even though Bob was never wanted by the US forces).  This has been a very very weird year

SWG's future should be "open source".

I don't know what is going to happen, but all I want for xmas is pre-cu / NGE SWG .

Originally posted by teqnik

I don't know what is going to happen, but all I want for xmas is pre-cu / NGE SWG .

After all is said and done....GFE!!

Btw, the original article is back up.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Zapak_set_to_buy_out_Sony_Online_for_300_mn/articleshow/2643807.cms

What the OP write might be true.

But even though he claims to be the one, who knew everything about the NGE beforehand (which is a statement he did not prove), he definitely is not somebody, who can predict everything with 100% certainty.

For example, look at this post:

http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/695270#695270

Bioware is not about to take over SWG, cause they already press released that they are working on their own mmorpg

but it's for sure that Starwars Galaxies won't survive 2006         no mather how many rumors you already read, I can guarantee that it will be shutdown during the next few months...

Two bold statements. The first being totally contradictory to what he claims now. And the second is wrong, as we all know.

I smell fake. Sorry.

The problem with SWG/SOE/LA speculation is that sometimes (like the infamous "Jedi as starter profession" post on the SWG forum) the rumors, no matter how outlandish they seem to be at first glance, turn out to be true.

Then others, like the predictions that SWG will shut down in 2005, or 2006, or 2007, turn out to be wrong.

Coulple this with Smedley's terrible habit of lying constantly, and you have ridiculous rumors of an "Indian takeover" of SOE refuted by a man who's been caught in lies before, and therefore highly suspect.

The best bet is, realistically, to just not care.