at first sight this seems to be good news,but i have that strange feeling ,that there will be more news in the near future.. im pretty sure they will merge at least the german and the french server. the deal with psg could have been the last try to finance other languages than english. im sure that,if next starts 2015 ,we will have one european server and maybe 3 us. btw in my opinion the problems of eq2 is not ,that there is a company like psg. the problem is ,that soe isnt doing a good job with developing and design of the game. rok was the last expansion that was really interesting.....after that ,with every expansion,eq2 went more boring. only one questline ,and after that some script heavy dungeons,that were recycled for solo,group and raid (and the really dumb idea wth the last expansion ,that in every solo dungeon you can loot only 1 slot item for 1 or 2 classes). maybe the eq2 devs should play some of the newer mmo to see whats posssible (dont say that those mmo are better then eq2,but they have some nice ideas .last good idea in eq2 were events like ringwar ....and soe skipped that idea)
I hope SOE learned their lesson that it's better to do things in-house as it were for gaming then try to cut corners.
Best gaming News of the year!! Finally soon I can play DCUO again! With my DCUO account being back under my SOE account where it belongs! I was nothing but a total dissaster and misery with ProSieben, pretty much forcing me to stop playing DCUO. /shrug SOE has made plenty bad decisions over the years, but this one was the worst ever! Still tho and very sad.... the damage has been done. A lot of people have quit and left and we will have to wait and see if people come back or not. The EU playerbase has taken so much abuse from SOE over the years, that for many the whole ProSieben debacle was the last straw. /sigh I really hope SOE has finally, after all these years of messing around, learned their lesson. One can only hope.
When I opened my mail some minutes ago, my heart stopped for a moment - SOE, don't you know people can also die from too good news Now I have no more wishes for Christmas, my present already arrived - today, THANKS!
So pleased they finally saw sense. Thanks to my fellow EU's and everyone else for putting up with my moaning posts in the PSS for us Euros- Nope! thread Now I can actually get excited about "Next" and look forward to getting my DCUO account back. SOE - that's 2 strikes on the "crap decisions".. lets leave it at that now eh?
As I had already pointed out in the other thread, the wealthy parts of Europe alone have a higher population than the USA, so being forced to go through some weirdo company no one wants to buy from would have absolutely devastated the uptake of EQNext. Plus Pro Sieben as a company needs to make money, so obviously SoE would have received less of every $ spent than if they allow us to give them our money directly. So getting rid of the intermediary company is a simple win win situation, SoE gets more money and Gamers get to actually play SoE games.
Could you please keep your critique of the game for another topic? because what you are saying got nothing to do with OP. The deal didn't work not because EQ2 is a bad game but because Pro Sieben is just a horrible company. EU players are more than happy to deal with SOE as you can see from the response.
(( This is good news. Finally. So many of us have been asking for this decision since ... PSS1 first came on the scene. One thing remains for SOE to do: Please confirm that SOE All Access will also include EQN for Europeans, like it does for everywhere else in the world. ))
This is a good decision and I am very happy for the community to be back in one piece. However, just as we never had a full understanding of why ProSieben became involved in the first place we have no understanding of why they are no longer involved. Although I am very happy they are not!
SOE wouldn't have gone with Prosieben in the first place if they didn't think they could have gained an advantage out of it. For me at least it seems likely that in their partnership agreement there was a section about SOE reviewing how Prosieben was doing with EU customers after a set period and SOE found ProSieben was not producing acceptable results to maintain the partnership.
My memory is hazy, but I seem to recall that when this "deal" was originally announced, the driver was Sony Corp of America (who own SOE) and not SOE themselves. SOE's EU player base were a sweetener to the TV company that owned PSG so that SCoA could create a SONY movie channel on German TV. Part of the rationale was that an EU based TV/Gaming company could bring in more EU players by advertising SOE games on EU TV, not that any advertising seems to have happened, at least in the UK. Whatever the reasons for the demise of this partnership and I guess we'll never get to know, I'm just glad it's over.