According to Sony Online Entertainment's president, John Smedley, we will one day see a console MMO to rival the success of World of Warcraft.

Speaking in an interview, Smedley said:



For the PS3 to host an MMO with success equal to that of WoW, it would currently have to have an attach rate of nearly 100%, with 10 million players having subscribed to WoW as of January and as of December 31st last year 10.49 million PS3s had been sold. The last global sales figures for the 360, meanwhile, put it at 17.7 million units, while the Wii had sold over 20 million units as of the end of 2007.

That's not to say that it won't happen, of course - just that if it does it will take a while yet.

But... console online gaming is "going to be one of the next huge phases of growth in the online gaming space"? Thanks, John. That was really informative.

This comes following news last week that SOE will be brought under the Sony Computer Entertainment umbrella.

Smedley also helpfully tells us, "For some time now we've been working closely with the team at SCE and any announcement about [the PlayStation store] will be forthcoming."

SPOnG's not too sure about that. Surely past announcements fall under the umbrella of "any announcements"...? We'd like to think that Smedley either misspoke or there was a typo and what he actually meant was that 'an announcement will be forthcoming'...