First of all, the Contract is signed. A joint press release will be going out tomorrow morning, but it’s important to all of us here that our community hear it first and here it straight from us. So without further ado:
Pirates of the Burning Sea will be published in partnership with Sony Online Entertainment’s Platform Publishing. This is an important deal for Flying Lab Software and we know how passionate our community is about this issue. So before you start posting your thoughts on our forums, let me share how this particular arrangement differs from publishing deals you may have read about in the past.
So what is “Platform Publishing”? It’s a partnership program in which SOE and an independent developer work together to release a game. It’s very different from SOE’s main publishing efforts, where they develop the games internally (i.e. Everquest 2, Star Wars: Galaxies). Instead the developer makes the game, SOE publishes it, and together we divvy up the various responsibilities.
Here is the breakdown:
Flying Lab Software
* Game Development
* Community
* Customer Support
* Server Operations
Sony Online Entertainment
* Billing
* Launcher
* Retail Distribution
* Localization
* Marketing
Here’s why we decided to work together.
First, we weren’t going to work with anybody unless we kept control of the game development and the community. That eliminated a lot of potential partners right off the bat. Let me tell you a few things that are different about working with SOE than with the other MMO publishers we talked with:
1) We keep complete ownership of Pirates of the Burning Sea.
2) We have no interference from SOE on the development/ideas of the game.
3) Because we financed Pirates ourselves, we keep most of the revenues so we stay strong and independent.
4) The contract they gave us actually says what we agreed to verbally.
Pretty basic stuff, I know, but we talked to maybe a dozen other development houses and MMO publishers, and many of them had one or more of the following in their relationships and contracts:
1) Publisher takes ownership of the intellectual property.
2) All sorts of verbal promises that never appeared in the contract.
3) Publisher approval over the game’s design.
All of this is why negotiating with SOE was such a breath of fresh air. I kept tensing at various points, expecting them to pull off the mask of humanity and say “Puny humans, our superior alien contract will take control of your game!” But thankfully for both us and all life on Earth, that never happened.
Here’s exactly what SOE brings to this that we want:
1) Strong distribution – We want Pirates of the Burning Sea to be in every retail store that carries games. SOE has that down cold.
2) Great localization process – We really want a simultaneous launch in Europe and the US because we think it could do as well over there as over here. Working with SOE gives us the best chance of making that happen.
3) Enthusiasm – I really can’t stress this enough. You can write a contract to say anything you want about how much work each party will do, but that’s nothing compared to having your partners genuinely excited to work with you, from the marketing people to the programmers to the executives. And boy, are they excited. (You would be, too, if a great game fell into your lap!)
4) Clockwork process – We want to launch Pirates this fall. The game is in great shape and we’re going into large-scale beta testing this week. To hit a fall launch date, we needed a partner who knows the entire process inside and out, someone who can just start turning the crank and making it happen.
We had two other paths to launching this fall: going it alone and working with another independent outfit we’ve been spending time with. Both of these were good options in general (especially the partnership approach, as we really like those guys). But for either of those approaches to work for a fall launch, everything would have to go right the first time and we’d still need some luck. By working with SOE we know it’ll just happen.
.
The expansions were a good effort and as far as I can tell after playing it recently, the only bad things they have done are the BFRs. A lot of people love them though. I love PlanetSide, but sadly its been dying for a long time. Money has killed it, not SOE.