I do not have warm and fuzzies about Smed. I don't know who's decision it was to spend 95% of the EQ income on other games (which all failed) but I suspect it was him (or at least he was a big proponent of that). I've seen this before in people who create a successful product. They get bored with it and think they can hit the jackpot again, only bigger and better. They usually fail, because they don't realize that having a hit is as much luck (being in the right place with the right product at the right time) as anything else. Instead of plowing the money back into EQ it was all poured down the drain. So there is a good chance that EQ could be a thousand times bigger than it is if it had received support.
This ^ At one time there were devs who actively disliked EQ and wanted to just shut it down so they could spend more time creating the losing propositions that they kept pulling out of thin air
$med is a good manager with seemingly terrible business sense. Quick to shirk the blame on other things (Verant this, SOE that, Amazon killed the deal). I don't live John's life or know him personally, but the carnage he's left in his wake should absolutely terrify the C-suite at Amazon. On the flipside, Amazon has more money to burn than any game studio in the world. Happy for $med. I hope he helps make a game that actually releases.
Or wanted to make EQ (and EQ2) into a different game that their children were playing no matter how much that would 'break' their own games and/or drive away the paying customers of their games.The continual churn of the newest iteration of "Next" or EQ3 was also frustrating and part of the same effort to convert it into a clone of a completely different game. But yeah, those at the top hating the product they produce no matter how it's liked by the paying customer base is exceedingly disparaging. Looking only to a theoretical potential customer while disregarding what the current customers want and like is a great way to run a business... into the ground. (and I'm, sadly, not just talking about this game)
Amazon also hired a guy I worked under at a failed company that made terrible e-commerce sites. They allowed HTML tags, including <script> tags, in usernames. So a random new user could make dialog boxes and stuff pop up whenever their username appeared! This head-of-an-ecommerce-platform-development-company guy's response to me when I reported it as a critical bug: "Why would anyone want to hack a website?" I was speechless. He's now a project manager at Amazon.
Mastermind? He let the con artist smokejumper run wild doing permanent damage to eq2 and waste who knows how much money on eq3
He seemed to me like the kind of guy who never learned from mistakes... I miss the years gone by, but I can't say I miss him.
The press is always exaggerating to increase the value of their articles and to gain attention. Brad was even called a gamer god back in the early years in a game magazin. It does get problematic when the denoted ones start to identify themselves with those words and acting weird. New World ? It seems that Amazon Games is a haven for bad managers and devs and San Diego is a rather small place which does suffer from the revolving door phenomen. If they would be a game guild they would be a just recruit everyone guild. It is amusing to watch how they struggle to put their feet into the gaming market at all costs but I don't underestimate them because they have such a huge money supply. They won't stop until they have assimilated most parts of the gaming market just like a borg cube. We should also not underestimate Smed. For sure he is polarizing but he had shown endurance and single-mindedness and is like a wobble man that never does give up. Combine that with the money supply and the long-term borg strategy of Amazon and you get a perfect match.
That’s pretty funny considering that they had a chat bug, where html images and other things could be added to global chat. As well as injecting code into chat to crash other players, change other player client settings, exploit quests, etc. ============ If you type an image tag and link to an ingame file, then link any item afterwards, it will show up in chat. Example: <img src="lyshineui\images\icons\items\consumable\sausaget1.dds" height="300"></img> [LINK ITEM HERE] Have tested a few other tags and attributes and haven’t found anything else too crazy yet, but it may be possible to do other things with this. There’s also probably other ways of getting the html to go through without linking an item, but I didn’t spend enough time messing with it. ========== https://forums.newworld.com/t/html-img-tag-usable-in-chat-can-use-to-link-any-in-game-image/467399 ========== The latest appears to be an unintentional flaw in the game’s chatbox that allows toxic players to enter and run malicious image code in the chatbox; when unsuspecting players in the game hover that text with their mouse, it can crash the client. According to YouTubers Josh Strife Hayes and Callum Upton, who broke the news, such players could potentially perform additional functions using the code, including duping gold, jacking up their volume, triggering sound effects, and altering other players’ settings remotely. (Yes, the YouTubers have escalated these bug reports.) https://massivelyop.com/2021/10/29/...his-one-revolving-around-malicious-chat-code/
Amazon had made a few absolute turkeys that either closed down rapidly or never even made it out of development they were so bad. It's recent New World efforts are a step in an approximation of the right general direction, despite a comically & tragically bad start. I actually think Smed can probably helm the ship of an MMO that is a lot more successful than anything they've put out so far, guy gets a lot of hate but he was still the person who wanted EQ built & put his neck on the block a lot to get it made. People forget that. I have no idea if it was Smed who called the shots about siphoning funds away from EQ to make other games or not, but I don;t think it matters even if he did - back in that time this was Standard Operating Procedure for all software houses, GAAS (Games as a service) models were not really what shaped company financial strategy then either, that strategy / re-investment was simply not even thought about much let-alone practised. Daybreak has evolved a GAAS type strategy over time, even if it took a frustratingly long time to do so so EQ is probably much better funded (as a proportion of its current income) now than EQ was back then from its own proceeds - even if it is still bankrolling at least some of the development of a bunch of other titles. And don't forget Free Realms, Smed was behind that too and that was absolutely huge for a time. In any case I wish him well, a new Sci-Fi MMO with a leader who actually understands MMO games, who was & is still a massive gamer himself could be a good thing.
More than anyone in the world, John Smedley is responsible for the current state of the EverQuest franchise. Make of that what you will.
And it was eventually cancelled by Smed too. I can't think of a studio head that has more cancelled MMOs and games than dear old Smed. Given the disastrous Amazon Rings of Power and the failed New World MMO. It is fitting that he is working for Amazon.
We don't have insight why he did so if he did so. Often it is just about the "numbers" and hard decisions have to be made. The gaming industry is a competitive business and the investors are greedy for cash. A game manager/CEO or studio head is always standing inbetween the players, the employees and the investors and does receive the most pressure. You have to walk in a man's boots to know why he made this or that decision.
