John Smedley is considered one of the key figures in the MMORPG genre. He has now landed at Amazon. He leads a team there and is working on a new project.
John Smedley was the somewhat brash but quite charming president of Sony Online Entertainment for 12 years. He was involved in classics of the MMORPG genre like Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies. As the head of SOE, he was also heavily involved with Planetside and H1Z1 . Just before he left, he announced that Everquest Next would blow everyone away. That would definitely not be vaporware.
Everquest Next was ultimately cancelled.
There was also a longer ugly confrontation involving Smedley with a group of “hackers” that included bomb threats, insults, and DDoS attacks. Ultimately, this and a reorientation at SOE led to Smedley’s departure from his long-standing studio, which had already separated from Sony and was operating as “Daybreak Game Company”.
Those were turbulent years.
Most recently, Smedley experienced failure with his own project and studio. He dissolved the indie studio Pixel Mage just at Christmas 2016, and his retro MMORPG Hero’s Song will never be released.
Apparently, Smedley has landed softly. As Amazon announces, a new Amazon Games Studio has been opened in San Diego. Smedley will lead it. The studio is already hard at work on a new project that is supposed to use Twitch and the cloud to connect players. So it sounds like online multiplayer – Smedley must feel right at home.
Amazon has been recruiting top talent for quite some time. Developers have been leaving their jobs at established game studios for a while now. Shortly thereafter, “Amazon” appears on their resumes and they are working behind the closed doors of Amazon on new games.
Three of them are already known: “New World” is considered the most interesting game for MMO fans that Amazon has introduced so far.
We can be curious about what Smedley is working on with a team. Money shouldn’t be a big problem there, unlike during his time as an indie.
The studio SOE, now known as Daybreak, is not doing very well in Smedley’s absence:
