Sony Online Entertainment makes the rules, and the players make the games

SAN FRANCISCO — Sony Online Entertainment was one of the first developers to learn that massively multiplayer online games need to be continuously evolving in order to keep potentially millions of players engaged over the course of many years. In today’s market, players need to have a hand in guiding that evolution, and that’s the mantra guiding the development of Planetside 2 and EverQuest Next Landmark.

We could view this as SOE coming full-circle on something it pioneered in 2003 with the release of Star Wars: Galaxies, in which players could craft almost every item in the game. We could also look at it as SOE taking a nod from Eve Online, which figuratively provides a sandbox and steps back to enable players to do whatever they want with it. Eve Online has been so successful that it continues to run off a subscription model even though that the MMO worlds considers that monetization scheme is dying — or already dead.