SOE President Talks Free Realms
Sony takes its first step into the realm of casual online gaming.
"The title is said to be primarily aimed at children, particularly girls. It will be free to play for the most part, although a paid subscription will be in place granting players access to special zones and activities. Likely, this means the game will follow a model similar to that of popular MMORPGs like Maple Story.
In an interview with Gamasutra, SOE president John Smedley commented, "Free Realms is fantasy, but it's [a] whimsical fantasy. It's not RMT per se, the idea of selling special customizations is key. You can play the game completely free. It's ad-supported, you can customize your avatar to your heart's content, then there will sort of be an additional catalogue of items we'll be selling that will allow people to customize even further."
The SOE president continued: "It's our first experiment in the fantasy space with this concept, what we call the 'velvet rope' model. We're taking our cues from some of the other successful games in the Asian market, titles like Kart Rider. You know, Mario Kart except you buy your power ups? Games designed around that concept can be very successful, without the problems we see in unsupervised RMT. I want to expand the concept of customization into player selling to one another, and creating for one another. Free Realms is going to be a big push in that direction."
"Our big goals with the game are whimsy and accessibility. User-generated content: I want to get it out of the space of buzzwords and into the game. Everybody talks about it, but it's hard to pin down," asserted Smedley. "I'd rather give people some lines, and say 'color inside these any way you want.' Then you can't just generate whatever you want, but you have users creating content themed towards our goals."
Smedley also remarked on the new direction this game marks for SOE as a whole, commenting, "Free Realms, in my mind, is going to take the company in a direction we've needed to go for a long time. We've been making these Lord of the Rings kind of 'high fantasy takes itself too seriously' games for a long time now. I don't think those games are bad, by any stretch of the imagination … it's been our bread and butter. But those games don't have that kind of mass level of accessibility, I think, even World of Warcraft notwithstanding. We're not aiming for those kinds of numbers with FreeRealms, we're aiming for a lot bigger. I think that bringing something that I can play with my kids to the market is a big deal."
