You should understand what words mean before you use them. Market Segmentation is about identifying portions of your market that are higher growth or higher profit, and developing strategies to market to those portions.
What you are referring to (or trying to) is Niche Marketing, the process of identifying a specific higher growth or higher profit market segment and developing your product to address their needs better than the less-targeted competition.
What you are missing here is that both these related strategies are intended to help a company address higher growth and higher profit opportunities.
This is not niche marketing:
This is “painting yourself into a corner because you identified a non-growth market segment, and then also failed to address their needs through proper game design”. One reason EVE had any success at it is because other companies are too smart to develop a product for a non-growth market.
Again, please work on understanding words before you use them. Here you’re trying to pretend that ‘competition’ means ‘PvP’. Virtually all MMOs feature competition for resources, market competition, competition for drops etc. ‘Competition’ is not PvP.
The thread topic is about non-consensual player combat and it’s effect on the player base. My posts and links are about player combat. The statistics I linked from CCP Quant use PvP as player combat. Your own comments are in defense of and support for non-consensual player combat, specifically in high sec.
I know you don’t want to address the issue that PvP is a minority activity in EVE, and that non-consensual PvP is the minority of the minority, but pretending everything in the game is PvP won’t make it so.
I use information from credible industry sources and verifiable data to base my opinions on. You use “the game must support non-consensual PvP because I like non-consensual PvP”. Guess who doesn’t understand how gaming businesses work?
Yep those steadily dropping player numbers are surely proof of “fabulous design”. As is the recent desperate flailing of CCP to do anything at all to correct those nose-diving numbers. In fact, if you remove Alphas, bots and multi-boxers from the above numbers, you’re likely down to less than 10,000 actual players average on-line these days. To support hundreds of employees and the approx. $50 million per year burn rate of CCP’s expenses, they need to do better than that.
Well you can call it piracy or whatever makes you feel good about it. From a game population perspective, what you actually are is a parasite. Each parasite in the game needs dozens if not hundreds of healthy victims in order to continue leeching resources from them. Each parasite chuckles to himself while stroking his ego, maybe goes on the forums to brag about his mighty battles against mining vessels and laugh about the tears of the fallen.
Meanwhile, every single parasite has annoyed, irritated or driven off dozens if not hundreds of potential players. They may not all quit, but they will certainly all complain about the parasites in EVE to everyone who will listen. That’s not a sustainable growth model.
Go into any public chat in any major MMO these days and say “Hey fellas I’m kinda bored here, I was thinking about trying out EVE Online. Is that a good game?”. Then you will see what the general public perception of EVE is like.
Hint: It’s not positive.
Well, your ‘facts’ have been proven wrong, your understanding of words questionable, your view of MMO history skewed. I suppose it’s no surprise that your reading comprehension isn’t that good either. I in fact did not advocate for changing it but only pointed out that credible industry sources and EVE’s own history show that non-consensual PvP, especially in starter regions, is bad for the population growth of a game.
I’m indicating this is one poor design choice among many in EVE. If the other design choices were much better, EVE could still support non-consensual PvP and thrive. Since it is clearly not thriving, it means that some of the bad design choices have to be reviewed and addressed.
And sorry, but if that means your niche of a minority of a segment of parasites goes the way of the dinosaur, then evidence shows that it won’t be much of a loss to EVE at all.