You are here: Last month, Star Wars Galaxies developer Sony Online Entertainment and publisher LucasArts put the marquee title through a number of significant changes.
Central to the strategy was the goal to make the persistant world game more inviting to the hundreds of thousands of Star Wars fans who may have felt the game presented too high a barrier to entry. While estimates of subscribers remain north of 200,000, even at two, three, or four times that figure, it's a tiny percentage of the millions of people who are enamored with the Star Wars backstory.
In a move designed to tap that underserved market, the game's developer and publisher released an update to the original 2003 title last month. The changes include a slimmed down number of professions a gamer can assume, a revamped and simplified "early" or "new player" experience, fewer obstacles to becoming a Jedi, and a streamlined pay model--offering users a chance to download the update for free, as well as free play in the game's first 10 levels.
What's behind the strategy, swg credits and what's ahead from the game's maker? GameSpot spoke with SOE president John Smedley.
GameSpot: Tell me a little bit about the process that goes into this kind of product management and repositioning in the marketplace. How do you get to that point?
John Smedley: I guess this all started when Jim Ward became president of LucasArts. [As a group], we asked ourselves what could we do to significantly improve Galaxies. Star Wars is a big mass-market IP and we always felt like we had underdelivered on the Star Wars experience.
I think the numbers that we had, while they're OK for the MMO space, could be a lot bigger, given the amount of people that know about Star Wars.
GS: How did you drill down to know what aspects of the games were right for a change?
JS: We spent quite a bit of time and money doing product research. We did a number of focus groups and talked specifically about changes that we could make to the interface, to the combat, and to the overall gameplay experience--to make it a lot more fun. We also did surveys asking the current user base what was missing, what were things we could do to make the game better.
GS: How does the internal team participate?
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