During a recent interview, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) indicated that they are going to be supporting the PSN medium in a huge way. It seems that as if every MMO that SOE makes from here on in will be available for the PS3, and as they are the studio behind the likes of Everquest, Planetside and Vanguard, one can't help but jump for joy at such a prospect.

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Do you find that the bottom tier of technology is becoming less important now? Most people who buy new computers can certainly play EverQuest at this point. Do you find that you're having less problems with that these days, or are there a lot of people who are still on the older stuff?

NB: The majority of people are on the older stuff. Whenever you're making a game and are proud of it, you want as many people as possible to play that game. In the PC world, the lower the machine spec you can get, the bigger potential audience you have, and the more chance you have for people to look at your work.

How many subscribers does the original EverQuest have now?

NB: We don't disclose those numbers.

I was mostly thinking about how surprising it was to me that anything could maintain someone for quite that long, or at least a group of people who keep coming back and subscribing.

NB: It's a tremendously healthy game. We're coming out with our next expansion in November. We have our next [just-held] fan fair in August in Las Vegas, to meet with the people who play that game. It's going strong, and showing no signs of going away.

Are you considering console MMOs more deeply?

NB: Absolutely. We have EverQuest Online Adventures that came out on the PS2 four years ago, and that was one of the first, along with Final Fantasy XI, to be a console MMO. For us as a company moving forward, all of our MMOs in development have a console component.

That's good, because now the consoles are really set up to do it. The PS2 wasn't necessarily set up to be online in terms of Sony's support of the network.

NB: Yeah, the network adapter was an add-on, and you really had to understand how to configure network stuff to get it to work well, and it was both broadband and dial-up. In MMOs, you infinitely prefer being able to rely on broadband if at all possible. Now that everything's broadband-enabled, it's great.