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Interview conducted by Paul Presley

Just lately we've seen a number of big-name projects being cancelled. When news of another one going under breaks, how does that affect you guys?

Sites: Initially it's very frustrating because we still believe at this point that the more quality MMOs that come out, the better. Every time a new game comes out, we maintain our subscriber base, but they gain a new one and that just helps to grow the market, it gets more people interested in MMOs. So the more quality games that come out the better, although there is something to be said about there being something like over a hundred MMOs currently being in development.

At this point we're going to start seeing the weak ones weeded out. The players will benefit from having the really high quality high-end games sticking around. Games like City Of Heroes and World Of Warcraft have helped to draw a lot of people into the genre, people that wouldn't necessarily have wanted to play these games if it wasn't specifically for that game being there.

It seems to me that the MMOG genre works to a very different dynamic to others. Nobody really complains about there being 'too many' first-person shooters for instance, and almost every FPS in development gets a release regardless of quality. MMOs seem to work to an entirely different set of criteria...

Sites: I think the big difference is just the financial cost. You can take a ten-person team, throw in a million or two million dollars and in theory end up with a really good looking FPS. Our development team on the other hand is 96 people strong, we licensed a professional composer to write the soundtracks, we have all the voice actors. The amount of money required to go into something like this is really frightening for most publishers. By the time we launch we'll already be into $20 million.

But the reward is that once the game launches, you can get something like EverQuest where we're almost into its sixth year and we have over 400,000 subscribers still in there. I remember reading about Warhammer and that the main reason behind the cancellation was that, based on the current situation with the development team and how much money they'd spent to date, they couldn't justify spending the additional money needed to finish it off and get it out.

And yeah, that hurts a lot of developers who are trying to get their games

You say weeding out the weakest members of the herd, but when you look at the MMOG genre there is definitely a strata system at work. At one end are the EverQuests that are massive in scope and depth and totally involving. Then at the other are games like City Of Heroes that are good, fun games but if you look into them with any depth, there's not a great deal to them. You have to ask which is better for the industry, something deep and long-term or a game that keeps churning through a large but fluid audience?

Sites: As a company we prefer getting a long, steady subscriber base. In fiscal terms it's great getting tens of thousands of people constantly coming through the door just for a month or two, but we've found that retaining a steady stream of a 100,000 or so subscribers over five and a half years is definitely a more preferable model. Which is what we're trying to do with EQII. We're not expecting to sell hundreds of thousands of copies on day one - we're expecting to sell a lot! - but our goal is to maintain a subscriber base.

Do you see EQII as having the same type of goals for SOE as EQ, following the same type of future development?

Sites: The big focus for EverQuest II is obviously to expand the market as well as get back some of the ex-EQ players. We've had over two million people come through our doors with EQ and either maintain a subscription or cancel. Quite a few of them have cancelled for a number of reasons - the game required to much time dedication or the initial experience was too confusing or frustrating for people. So we really want to get those people back in with EQII, get them interested in the game again.

So the way we set up character creation and the tutorials and how we educate the players when they have to make major decisions. We no longer just throw them into the deep end. We help them wade in slowly.

Studies of EQ have shown that the most popular race/class combo is a dark elf fighter, while the ogres and trolls were almost bereft of players. How do player trends such as this affect the way you develop expansions?

Sites: Whenever we decide to include a race in the game, we make sure that it has all the options available to the other races - the same number of quests, the same amount of content. We do look at the numbers though and ask ourselves whether if we pulled a race, would people really miss it? And usually they would.

So once it's in the game we're dedicated to making sure a race is viable and that there's just as much content for it as there is for a human or a dark elf. If you look at any given server, 29 percent of the people on there play as dark elves and only 2 percent play as trolls so you look at those numbers and you ask why you would want to keep that race in. But 2 percent of 400,000 people is still a lot of people.