In 'Galaxies' Far, Far Away...

There Is Discontent, Evolution And Outrage In Star Wars Galaxies

(CBS) 

"For some reason or another, the gaming industry has grown used to the idea that a game can ship with some bugs and that this is somehow an excusable side effect of dealing with computer software," Silverman contends.

If a CD doesn't play the last track, you go get your money back. If a DVD is missing a chapter, you go get your money back. If the display on your television doesn't work properly, you go get your money back. If a car company forgets — I don't know, the seat belts, you go get your money back (assuming you were dumb enough to buy a car without seat belts in the first place). Moreover, if one particular company keeps releasing CDs or DVDs or TVs or cars with bugs in them, people start to avoid that company like the plague because they're releasing "incomplete" products.

Of course, this is not only a problem with Sony Online Entertainment. It has infested the entire gaming industry.

Despite a multitude of furious postings at the Star Wars Galaxies forums about the NGE, Smedley told me the postings are only a vocal minority. Most players, he said, are in the game.

Now, I am strongly in favor of common sense, honesty and decency (which undoubtedly bars me from holding public office), but it's hard not to wonder whether Smedley's vocal minority contention is spin — counter-clockwise to Richard Nixon's "silent majority."

This is not to suggest in any way that Smedley is Nixonian, but there is the matter of logic and numbers.

According to MMORPGChart.com, Star Wars Galaxies had approximately 250,000 subscribers in July 2005. Recently "hacked" numbers purporting to show how many active players were in the game potentially put current player numbers far below that.

When I asked Smedley whether those statistics were authentic, leaked or not, it was hard to get a direct answer.

"For years," he said, "we have not put up the numbers for competitive reasons." "Somebody hacked to get those statistics. They did it on the client side. Those [numbers] are not public information, nor is all the information there."

The post, which has been duplicated on many sites, alleges that on a Friday evening, there were only 10,363 subscribers playing.

These numbers never claimed to be a count of Galaxies subscriptions. They are merely an alleged snapshot of how many people were on the servers at a certain point in time.