DC Universe Online Interview

Eurogamer provides a three-page interview with Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley, mostly discussing the launch on two platforms and how to sell it to PS3 users.

Eurogamer: Paying a monthly subscription to play a game will be a shock to the PS3 audience. How will you convince them?

John Smedley: The game has to attract them. A PS3 owner can put this [game] in, and if they don’t want to make a commitment they don’t have to. They can decline to the commitment after 30 days. If they like it they get to continue and subscribe.

With that kind of choice in there, that is going to turn a lot of heads. People aren’t used to this kind of game, and we have to convince them, and I think it is harder to convince people with this sort of game than with a standard console game.

However, they’re also going to see the advantages of a game like this: instead of DLC you get patches every few weeks and every few months you get big patches. And you get a lot more content than you do with a standard game where you might get DLC once or twice a year. You’re going to be getting things every single month, and major content updates.

This is a game we intend to have live for, you know, five, ten years. Some of our games have been running for 12 years. We’re in this for the long-haul, and we’re there to support our customers.

(…)

Eurogamer: What’s the DC Universe post-release content plan like?

John Smedley: After release you can expect patches from us with new content and all kinds of fun stuff on a monthly basis. We’ll actually be doing some patches on a weekly basis if we spot any issues.

But the plans are about a month out you can start expecting major pieces of content and major new features to come in. We’ll be adding all kinds of cool stuff. We’re not quite ready to reveal what our after-launch plans are yet. Needless to say we have a lot of content we’re in QA on that players haven’t seen yet.

The monthly subscription fee means players can expect a lot of new content from us. And I say a lot – I really mean that. This is something that we feel obligated to the players, because they are paying monthly sub fee.

Eurogamer: Will there be any discrepancies between the updates on PC and PS3?

John Smedley: Largely we’re going to try and keep them the same. There’s some physical, practical differences in timing of release – maybe a day or two separating them. But they should be the same.

In the case of the PlayStation 3, as I said before, we don’t just get to put things up – they actually have to go through the format QA team and SCEA and SCEE. That means that will take a little big longer. But what we’ll do is hold the PC version until then.