Seriously, this worries me. This is the first time Sony's financial problems have affected it's gaming sector and it's really unsettling to know that SOE technically doesn't exist anymore.

Thoughts?

Yep, Sony doomed. Can't wait to see what they're selling next :)

Maybe. I wouldn't start panicking just yet but I mean, they seem to be losing a lot lately what with 1 billion + last Q and SoE gone now and soon will probably be their mobile division and they shut down their PC division a while ago and TV division is next imo after mobile is gone so neh.

The main advantage of having such a large company like Sony is that you can sell off divisions in order to stay alive for a veryyyyy long time but at the sametime, its not exactly a good thing if that is one of the main ways that you can stay alive. But we will see. The gaming division is fine for now but if they sell of something a lot more major, then I think we should start worrying

What did it really do for the subsidized part that Sony has called Sony Computer Entertainment inc. ?

If anything it was for Sony not playstation, it really was in no real form tied to Playstation at all only to Sony as a Company.

Think of it as Like SCE inc. Being with its subsidiaries all with the name SCE "something" all tied to SCE inc. Where did SOE fit into that part?

It didn't that's because it was and has always been

PC 1st
And if you are Lucky "some playstation" 2nd

I mean they really on concentrated on the Pc platform which means you could play many of the games they made already on non playstation hardware already.

No, SOE havn't done anything worth while in a long time. Also its been over 5 years since they started making EQ Next and scraped it once. Also takes these guys years to port something to consoles, They were also bleeding money since so many projects were failures( they had to early access H1Z1 to help finance it ).

I think Sony did great on getting ride of there Gaming PC division, hopefully they concentrate more on Playstation going forward.

I don't really know, but there's a good thing in all of this: they sold an online game maker studio, not one of their traditional ones. This shows that they haven't lost their minds like Square Enix or Capcom and don't plan to focus on online and mobile games.

There is always a bright side. :p

Doubt it, they are a pretty worthless developer and i'd guess they would have been a pretty big money sink for no reason. I think they sold SOE because they don't need it, it's losing them money and they need money. That's all there is to it.

No, no, no. First of all, the studio had over 500 employees. It was probably Sony's most expensive studio and none of their games justified the cost. They haven't had a huge hit since Everquest in 1999. If they weren't going to sell them they were probably going to shut them down. Second of all the studio had very little to do with Playstation. They only actually released three games between PS3 and PS4. They're a PC developer with console games as an afterthought. This is like Microsoft shutting down their Xbox TV business. It doesn't really matter all that much.

Most of the people who were freaking out over this news were just concern trolling and trying to get a rise out of people. Which is why so many people in that thread were banned.

Also cutting off parts of Sony does not = that they are going to translate to cutting off things that are tied to playstation. At this point Playstation has less than 9,000 employed, selling off SOE was 1000 people!

Remember SCE inc is a non public offered "Holding" of Sony: with Sony the corp being the only Share Holder, with no public buy in. Than you have subsidiaries under SCE inc. Like SCEA LLc.. its not like the part of Sony with more investment going into it is the target of more further cutting. Again SOE like SCE inc are subsidiaries of Sony but unlike SCEA, SCEE, SCEj..etc, SOE developed for PC 1st not playstation!

Not really. SOE has always been that random thing next to Playstation. It was owned by Sony, but never was part of the company's internal studios. SOE was more of an independent entity and really big one, at that. It is currently doing a lot of projects and after that, it needs to maintain them. SOE also contains somewhere between 500-1000 employees, which is huge.

So Sony is paying for the development & maintenance of all these MMO's and the employees for what? For these games to be on PC first and Playstation second. And that's if Playstation is lucky. In one of last year's quarters, Sony's gaming division lost $78 million. Part of that loss was from launching the PS4. However, $60 million of that $78 million came from poor sales from SOE.