SOE's Free Realms Hits 10 Million Players, Celebrates First Birthday

Sony Online Entertainment's free-to-play MMO adventure game Free Realms has surpassed over 10 million registered users since its launch in April 2009. The online game developer will celebrate Free Realms's first birthday and this milestone with a month-long in-game celebration. When the family-friendly MMO hit the 9 million user mark just last month, SOE partially attributed the title's success to its continuous development of new features and themed in-game events. Free Realms offers a variety of activities and minigames, like virtual pets, kart racing, and a trading card game that can be played with virtual cards or offline with physical card decks sold at stores. SOE will begin its in-game birthday festivities in mid-April with party decorations around different areas, live community events, two new combat minigames, and party hats and commemorative t-shirts for player avatars. Players will soon see new Rides like rain-bow mane Unicorn, Beetle, and Balloon Animal Pets, as well as Chick and Rabbit Pet Pals, too. The developer also plans to host a series of 15 birthday quests and a large scale cake fight that will have players helping prevent "the ruin of the Free Realms birthday bash by Cakenstein (pictured), a colossal monster made from cake recipes gone wrong." Ahead of those festivities, SOE is running a Double Station Cash Weekend promotion, in which players can purchase Station Cash prepaid cards from select retailers this weekend to receive double their value of Station Cash (in-game currency for buying virtual goods or upgrading to Membership status in the games). "Reaching 10 million registered players on the eve of Free Realms' first birthday is an incredibly exciting event for SOE and our passionate online community," says SOE president John Smedley. "Millions of gamers have confirmed that the genre we pioneered over 11 years ago with the original EverQuest continues to evolve and expand to include new styles of gameplay that reach a wider audience than ever before."