Trust me, PA’s small decline over this last year (largely attributable to general stress levels and ennui during the COVID crisis) does not impact their strategy WRT purchasing a company on the other side of the planet with a niche product and an extremely eager-to-please national government.
You don’t see the Prime Minister of Japan making videos for EverQuest, do you?
What kind? Axhind’s just a dude, man. He’s not being at all unreasonable, he doesn’t cause trouble… No clue what you’re talking about.
BZZZZZT.
CCP pioneered MMO microtransactions w/PLEX sales before even the Koreans were really doing it. PA isn’t putting EVE out to pasture at all w/Echoes. CCP is using Echoes as a way to keep their IP relevant and easily-marketed, and getting their Chinese (not Korean) partner Netease to do all the work for them.
Nor is PA being ‘parasitic’ at all. They shoved an extra $250M or so in bonuses into CCP’s pockets that they didn’t have to, and put EVE back in the ownership of people who actually want to be making computer games. Prior to that, CCP had been owned by a bunch of Venture Capitalists for close to ten years, including real estate developers and bank managers in the UK and Iceland—folks who really wanted nothing to do with computer games, but needed someplace safe to hide their money after the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
Those VCs, btw? They’re the reason absolutely nothing got done on the World of Darkness IP for those ten years. Seriously. CCP tried to do World of Darkness, but when that got cannibalized, that was basically it. Imagine you’ve got the IP for a AAA+ title like Vampire: the Masquerade—Bloodlines… and you do nothing with it. FOR A DECADE.
CCP sold White Wolf off to Paradox… because after a decade of not letting them do anything with it, the VCs made the money guys sell off the IP and the company name rights so they could slim CCP down to make it attractive to potential buyers.
Also going to Paradox with that deal, btw: the licensing for the pen & paper World of Darkness, Chronicles of Darkness (aka ‘New’ World of Darkness), Scarred Lands, and basically every other long-term licensing deal White Wolf/CCP had had for their various IPs. Literally ‘this is making us money for doing nothing’, but because the VCs were looking to divest, that all got sold to Paradox.
(Who, thank God, spun off White Wolf into its own P&P company again, run by people who love the IP, and said ‘we’re gonna make computer games because we know how the ■■■■ to do that!’)
PA has, instead, shoved a truckload of money at CCP, and told Hilmar to follow his heart. In other words, all this crap that’s been happening since the sale went final in 2018?
It’s all Hilmar. Every last bit of it. His vision.