More Juicy Details about PlayStation3 Live Service

SOE LogoLast August, Sony Online Entertainment made a quiet purchase that didn’t get a lot of press. And that quiet little purchase has become the underpinning of Sony’s online strategy for its PlayStation3.

In August 2006, Sony snatched up Worlds Apart, a Denver-based company best known for making online trading card games, like Star Chamber. Sony’s decision to jump into the online trading card game market marked a drastic shift for its plans. Prior to August, Sony’s online arm had focused entirely on 3D MMO’s, most of them featuring goblins and swords.

With the Worlds Apart acquisition, the company moved into a realm that has, historically, been far less profitable, and far more niche. But previous attempts at launching online trading card games have never included a gaming console. Thanks to Sony’s newly announced online plans for the PS3, it looks like Worlds Apart will be a major factor in the console’s initial push into virtual transactions. Surely, Sony sees dollar signs on all of those $3 booster packs of digital cards.

A source familiar with the company’s (SOE) plans cleared up the mystery for us. Rather than build new IP or adapt existing card games to the digital world, SOE’s plan is to mash as many different properties as possible into the trading card game format. This will be particularly apparent as the company’s PS3 Home service launches this fall. What sort of IP would that be, you ask?

Well, our source dropped a couple of names and titles on us: Stargate, Pirates, and Star Trek. The catch here is that real-world tie-ins will be the order of the day for all of these games. Players will likely be able to swap in-game cards for real-world cards, and vice versa. Wizards of the Coast has been doing this for years with the Internet version of the collectible card game that started it all, Magic: The Gathering Online, and it’s not surprising that Sony would ape the practice.

Elsewhere at SOE, the company is currently in negotiations with Steve Jackson Games to produce a Car Wars-based MMO. You may remember Jackson as the creator of table-top games like Illuminati, Munchkin, and the failed online game Ultracorps. It will be a while before the details of that negotiation will come to light, but Car Wars may not be the only game to come out of a successful barganing session: Jackson has long sought to bring Ultracorps back to life since it’s expunging from Microsoft’s MSN network in the late 90’s. In fact, Jackson told this reporter, last year, that he was at GDC 2006 specifically to find a new publisher for the game.

SOE isn’t giving up on PC MMO’s, however. Perpetual Entertainment’s Gods and Heroes should be available later season, but it already appears that the title is on its way to the dust bin. This standard Everquest-style MMO has taken too long to ship and has been a money pit for its publisher. Perpetual is also developing the Star Trek MMO. Some MMO insiders have wondered if Gods and Heroes is getting the short stick, as it was the first game built on Perpetual’s MMO engine. At this point, all signs seem to indicate that Gods and Heroes is the test run for the technology that will run Star Trek Online.

Since the Game Developers Conference is going on this week, phone calls to SOE in an attempt to confirm our source’s information were not answered. As everyone who’s anyone at SOE is in San Francisco this week, we’ll be hitting them up for confirmation as the day goes on. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: Friday, 3-9-2007

We’ve spoken to Steve Jackson about the property negotiations, and he declined to confirm that SOE was the company currently in negotiations for the rights to Car Wars. “One company has been saying for six months, ‘we want to talk, we’re just distracted right now.'” However, Jackson did comment that SOE certainly seemed a bit distracted, lately. At the moment, his life is taken up by the “Munchkin” brand of card games, he added.

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