You Don’t Have ProSiebenSat.1 to Kick Around Anymore

Well, that de-escalated quickly.

Sony Online Entertainment announced today that European players of DC Universe Online, PlanetSide 2, and EverQuest II will have their accounts merged back into the SOE fold and become direct customer of SOE, which is what they were two years ago when this whole PR disaster started. (The sordid history is over at EQ2 Wire.)

SOE_Logo

Since those three titles do not represent all of SOE’s games, I am not sure what this means to European EverQuest players (Did that ever get migrated? It was promised/threatened at one point.) but it seems to be a move in the right direction.

ProSiebenSat_logo

Never a popular proposition, the whole thing was summed up early on by a cartoon that depicted SOE selling off their European customers, represented by a protesting child, to a dubious looking man in a van.  A child molester as the metaphor for your plans is never a good thing.  Once that image took hold, there was probably no hope of a happy ending.

There is, of course, a FAQ about the transition up on the SOE forums.  The official cut off between the two is July 1, but it appears that the two year old region locking has been turned off as of today players can now play on any server they so desire.  The rest of it… changing launchers, updating accounts, conversion of SevenCash to StationCash, and the “you know it is going to happen” complaint from somebody who prefers ProSiebenSat.1 to SOE.. will transition over the coming weeks.  Read the FAQ for a vague guess at how this will roll out.

Anyway, put this on the list with the NGE and the Station Launcher as another SOE scheme that did not quite work out as planned.

7 thoughts on “You Don’t Have ProSiebenSat.1 to Kick Around Anymore”

  1. bhagpuss

    Hahahahaha! At work and typing on a tablet so keeping it brief but I believe I’m on record as saying this would happen before we got to EQNext. I’d guess that hitching the corporate wagon to player-made content and the huge legal complications that entails is what finally did for this utterly ridiculous idea. That and the fact that PSS1 were so double-plus ungood.

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  4. Wilhelm Arcturus Post author

    I do find the complete lack of context that some sites are giving this announcement to be amusing. Eurogamer seems to be the leader in that regard, with sites following their lead as though this were just some administrative change and not a two year old festering boil waiting to be lanced

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  5. kiantremayne

    Hmm, are there any European partners running licensed MMOs left now? Turbine took LotRO back from Codemasters (who, to be honest, had done a decent job of running it for us), Mythic-that-was rescued their European players from the unutterably execrable GOA, and SOE’s late experiment with licensing to PSS.1 is now dust. Can’t think of any others off the top of my head.

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  7. Wilhelm Arcturus Post author

    @SynCaine – Oh, I wouldn’t say that. This seems to be business as usual with SOE, taking on an idea without thinking it through, realizing it has serious problems the moment the community sees it, then continuing to run with it long past when it should have been dropped, and then finally dropping it.

    SOE will inevitably do the right thing in such circumstances, but the process to get them there can be tortuous and there are often times when you want to scream, “How could you not see this was going to be a problem before you announced this?”

    SOE is basically the guy at the office who was still quoting the ” Makin’ copies!” SNL skit five years after everybody else stopped finding it funny.

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