They wasted a MASSIVE amount of cash chasing a VR dream that is years from being anything other than a gimmick. We have plenty enough information to make that judgement. With that said at least they’re trying. You can’t be a trail blazer without making a few wrong turns… I wonder if it’s too much to hope CCP put full attention back on the game that brought them here instead of rinse and repeat scratch and sniff canned laughter for the masses. I for one am glad this VR nonsense is over with for now.
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This is right. The board decides and often comes up with crazy ideas that they read in magazines while waiting at the dentist. This is why some companies get the ■■■■ rid of the boards!
In case of VR, the decision factor was, is and will be very simple:
is it better and cheaper to play a game on a VR set, and can you create an insanely great product around it?
…especially considering the fact that gaming requires extremely quick reactions (like in sport) and evolves more and more towards team collaboration and PvP; or is it better and cheaper to run a game on three 4K gorgeous screens and a mouse+keyboard !
Can you imagine playing a game with a VR set where you need to input sometimes 5-10 actions in a split of a second in a PvP situation (Ouch… my neck, can’t turn my head anymore !) ? No Way Jose !
For me the answer is clear: NO, you can’t beat a screen/mouse/mechanical keyboard combination.
Now for the 100 CCP people who were dismissed (I still cannot believe that they hired 100 people for this VR garbage, what a blunder!) I am extremely happy for them because now they have the opportunity to find a real job and if its in software they can now finally do something useful (tip: for example work on EvE online) !
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So Sion Kumitomo was right.
And was libeled and banned from the CSM for telling, what we now know to be, the truth!
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Actually, yes, you can beat a mouse/keyboard combination. You just need a game that doesn’t require the player to input 10 actions/second. It’s been done before: there have been some great flight simulators that require a great joystick, and playing these games with a joystick was arguably much better than mouse/keyboard.
They were trying this with Valkyrie, and the control interface for that game was actually good. Don’t imagine playing EVE with a VR set, CCP isn’t trying to do that. They’re trying to diversify, and that means they just need to make a POPULAR, profitable game, not necessarily related to EVE in any way.
Valkyrie was more a proof of concept rather than a full, quality game, and the VR sets are too expensive right now for the visual quality they provide. I would definitely pay $700 for a 4k-equivalent surround visual experience, that would be awesome. I don’t play phone games, but a lot of people do, and for example Darkest Dungeon is a pc-like game that’s been ported (finally) to the phones and is pretty cool. But CCP doesn’t have to make an EVE game for phones, they just have to make a good phone game.
The next iteration in VR needs to have MoCap and Facial Recognition built into it, and made small enough to wear like a pair of glasses. Eve needs to focus on Story, Advertising, Immersion… Movie or TV series might be a good play. Tie in the Story to in game Events and you could draw a lot of ppl into the game to be a part of the Story. CCP Falcon I would love to chat with you some time and pick your brain on some of the fuzzier outliers in the EVE Cannon. I have a lot of great ideas for story arcs! Best of luck CCP.
We just want quality games, not proofs-of-concept. CCP can do the quality, their technical and artistic talent pools are excellent, but they need to put in the effort to release full games. Aim for at least 200 hours of playtime, for a single-player / offline game, for example.
There’s also the problem that any toy will get stale after a while, and we can PVP across the same space for quite some time, but eventually what’s the point? I think the wormhole expansion was great because it added new areas to explore and abuse, but more importantly I think that CCP needs to periodically enlarge the galaxy like that and tie-in new things for high-, low-, and null sec groups / alliances to do / explore / exploit. If they want this game to stay alive, they need to periodically refresh it with new areas or things to catch our interest.
And, if this were Blizzard or EA, the wormhole expansion would have been a paid expansion. New zones to explore, new gameplay, definitely would have charged a box price for it. Citadels aren’t like that; they’re new toys, technically, but they’re more of a re-work of the basics of the game to move towards player stations rather than NPC stations. Hopefully once they’re done with it, they unlock the map for dynamic sec-status and/or add new solar systems for us to play in. Paid expansion, hopefully worth it, so the need to come up with other games isn’t so strong; maybe they can just do expansions that are games unto themselves, get their profit / growth that way.
I would suggest that it is too late then. You are no an entrepreneur at that point, but a follower. An entrepreneur is one who leads innovation vs. following it.
Were the early innovators in the home PC market waiting for people to start buying home PCs? No, because there were no home PCs to buy. Similarly with video game consoles. When Atari first came out with Pong there were not thousands of games? No.
Your approach is not innovative nor entrepreneurial, sorry.
Again, not innovative, IMO. This is doing the same-old thing. Something like what they seem to be doing, implement structures that can essentially side step that code and move forward without having to unscramble the omelette. so to speak, may be the better approach…or not. Innovations can and often do fail.
Large companies with an enormous library of intellectual property are usually going to be far, far less innovative. Spending resources to protect that intellectual property is often a preferred strategy. Case in point, may Sonny Bono burn in hell for eternity. Such companies become bureaucratic and sclerotic.
My point is if you are going to get in on at the beginning of something big, you have to be out there doing stuff that 99% of people find to be a complete waste of time. CCP rolled the dice on VR and it came up snake eyes.
Sadly, just heard from another source, Shadowcat too. This makes me really think about the future of the German community and localization…
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That is not understandable. Are you sure about that? Or just rumors?
Joining in saying thanks for all the fine community work and all the best for the future … o7
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Really bad news for the entire EvE community. I’ll be grateful of CCP Phantom and his work for the German EvE Community.
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A little bit of a prediction based on previous things heard. The point of valk and the other VR projects was never to sell games to players. It was to develop software engines and sell them to other studios. In that way, I suspect the project wasn’t a “failure” but it was “completed.” They built the engines and are licensing them. There’s no more point in maintaining unpopular products that aren’t contributing revenue. Nevertheless, I suspect morale at CCP is rock bottom. I suspect that has been the case in the VR departments for a while now. People make games in the hope of them getting played. I haven’t gotten an excited vibe from CCPers in years, not since the first prototypes from valk, and even longer for EVE projects. I think that’s going to be the heart of the death spiral.
I don’t really know, but if a software company has an engine that’s being licensed, they’d need to keep some devs in-house to further refine the engine, perhaps help the licensee customize it for their game, provide tech advice, etc., no? The announcement seems to indicate they closed the entire building(s) down, didn’t keep any of the “engine” devs, and in fact are “re-focusing on EVE.”
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You’d be surprised what 1 guy can do. Quite a few years ago, my brother was the sole maintenance dev on the open source software that both Youtube and Wordpress used to handle user uploads. As long as they have 1 or 2 people who understand the engine, they can do a lot with it. Or maybe licensees have tapered off and they aren’t going to maintain it any more. But I do recall at one point the licensing was one of the more profitable parts of CCP as a company.
So its in fact like some kind of Halloween Slasher. So many people will be gone. 
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Can’t say I’m surprised. I don’t see why everyone here is saying to ONLY develop for Eve. Companies need to diversify. Eve is almost 20 years old, and while I don’t think it will ever truly die, it also has very little potential for its user base to grow. They need to keep developing it, but as a business they also need to branch out.
The problem is their design choices are so awful most people can recognize they’re bad in about 5 seconds. They need to pull an item from the Evil Overlord list and hire a 5 year old to call out an idiotic decisions or holes in their plans. Because as is they are not only choosing shaky or dying markets, but ALSO developing games specifically in an area where they are weakest.
Dust handled like ass. Valkyrie was cool, but that was about it. WoD was just a terrible idea. They make the same mistakes that novice developers do, where they come up with a vision without fleshing out systemic details on a low level: The HOW will they do it, rather than the WHAT they will do.
And thia is reflective of abhorrent mismanagement at the upper levels. It’s truly sad because the mid-level guys and individual game devs for Eve all seem to be quite level headed and intelligent, even if they occasionally make dumb decisions(RIP Rifter). Given the number of novice mistakes they make, they should probably stop trying to develop large games, and instead focus on a handful of small teams with reasonable but focused visions, which are LOW in graphical requirements.
Otherwise, they’re just going to keep failing to branch out until eventually in like another 15 years Eve dies and CCP folds.
It looks like whole game industry becomes gradually more shortsighted. Look at the amount of microtransactions, paid 0-day dlcs, purchasable lootboxes that is coming into the games now. Cash out and make another one. Hell, even Valkyrie have microtransactions.
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The new player generation’s and medias’ short attention span kind of force you to …
No it doesn’t. Microtransactions, DLC’s, loot boxes, all of these are extra income from your game. But the game has to be awesome to begin with, for these to work.
And if you take this cash and blow it on some half-assed no-effort venture that’s hitched to some unproven or limited platform, that’s not the fault of the media or the player generation, that’s the fault of your top management.
Players want good, full-featured games, playable on the hardware that’s currently in widespread use. CCP has brilliant talent and server tech, but no focus at the top. It’ll continue to be a waste until they re-focus on the hard work required to make something great and keep it there, and get some board-of-director people to advise Hilmar better (and convince him to listen to such advice rather than soloing it all Brad McQuaid- or Derek Smart-style).
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Seven known CCP devs, huh?
I don’t understand why Logibro, Manifest or Phantom are deemed redundant.
But then, this is CCP. At least they haven’t waited til Xmas this time.
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