In 'Galaxies' Far, Far Away

Smedley is more candid when he speaks generally, saying, "Have the numbers in Star Wars Galaxies gone down? I will tell you that the concurrent numbers have gone down. Are they as low as what was shown there? Absolutely not."

By "concurrent numbers," Smedley is referring to how many people are online at once.

Mark Wallace, a journalist and MMO blogger who maintains Walkering.com, ruminated on what the numbers could mean. "I'm not sure how 10,000 concurrent players compares to SWG's former levels, or to other games with a purported 250,000 subscribers. In part, it depends on how many shards there are. As a point of comparison, EVE Online, which has no sharding but just takes places in a single universe, has just over 100,000 subscribers. Yet it sees concurrency rates of 20,000 on a regular basis, which is fantastic."

"Second Life, on the other hand, also has 100,000 subscribers, swg credits but sees concurrency rates of around 5,000 or less most of the time," Mark told me.

I sought out LucasArts to ask about the hacked server numbers and community outrage, the company replied in the following e-mail:

"...it took a couple of days to touch base with the key members of the Galaxies team. Unfortunately, LucasArts has no comment for this story. I'll be sure to keep you informed with announcements for future Galaxies' plans and our upcoming titles."

And then a review-copy of Star Wars: Empire At War arrived on my desk.

Despite rumors that LucasArts imposed the changes, Smedley says the "Combat Upgrade" and "New Game Enhancements" were mutually agreed on. The decision to modify Star Wars Galaxies was made by both companies.

"There's a reason that we did this. The story … is kind of getting lost here…the game was losing subscribers. We had to make this game more accessible to a wider audience or eventually we would not have a business," he told me.

Smedley is not an unsympathetic character. I've rarely — if ever — been able to speak so candidly with a major company's president as I did with Smedley. And to his credit, few other men in his position take it upon themselves to personally respond to players on their forums when serious accusations are made. One has to respect that.