No. But we saw many many dollars going down the river. We saw no new and working product from CCP since…yeha…since EvE. That’s not a look of a company who needs to hit targets.
Right mate would you like detail bit more on gross over 6years and the running of 5decades for profit, it seems the 450 mil buy out could be worth 50 years of total subscription
The Iceland government, according to some formers, cares about CCP and EVE. However I do not think that is the case the other way around concerning what CCP thinks about their own country.
Sure you can. Just not marketing. Marketing is designed to make people behave to reward you, not themselves. This is just applied science.
Trust, but verify. People’s actions say a lot more. They provide insight into the people, and their plans, and their goals.
Oh, a lot has been done already 
Did you think an Asian investment management company active in the games industry would buy any company without first having done a full and complete mapping, product study, behavioural study on both customers and acquisition target?
On top of that, CCP has already paved the way. F2P is the foundation. F2P is not based on the old foundations of emergent behaviour, but on controlled and guided behaviour. It is a world of difference, but it also a very different application of game theory and game design.
In a model of emergent behaviour the game designer effectively has to follow and cater to the stories and mythology their customers generate through their interaction. CCP has been done with that a long long time, not just because of historic traumas. In a F2P model game design sets boundaries, provides specific pathways, and that only ends in a mechanical universe, so to speak.
As it is a commercial venture, that means that all the mechanics have to serve the commercial goals. It is not hard to extrapolate that this is profit driven. It is business, optimisation rules and mindset applies. So that which pays the most is prioritised. Yes, that is measured and weighed for impact and potential unintended consequences, but the driver remains profit. Over time one of the hallmarks of such a venture model is that the methods and the focus of mechanics affects mindset of the venture, it creates and expands the contact gap between business and customer. Which makes it easier to no longer treat the product as a game, but as a mechanical construct for commercial goals. Very much in line with the Asian business mindset.
To make a long story short, the acquisition of CCP Games fixates the evolutionary path of the product called EVE Online in a strict mechanical design focused profit driven model. Where some oldies at CCP can eat their heart out because they as Art can lead and rule to make things shiny and provide most of the content, but where the game environment is slowly reworked according to profit specific priorities through a mechanistic approach.
All F2P ends the same way, basically. For EVE it will take longer, and EVE will rub off on some things PA does, but PA determines priorities now. CCP has to meet financial targets, has to provide resources, has to expose itself to tech and idea transfer.
No, this is not correct. CCP Games is changing already. EVE Online has been changing already. It always has, just since the introduction of F2P it’s been made ready for a fundamental change. This is why you introduce F2P, there is no other goalset.
Yes, as long as CCP hits their financial targets they receive their cash bonus. Read the interview correctly.
This is not the same as “as long as CCP hits their financial targets EVE Online will stay the same”.
On the contrary, in order for CCP to hit financial targets, they must change EVE further, because if they had met their own targets, CCP would have either not gotten sold, or sold for a lot more.
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21.000 online = 21.000:2 (2 Acc/Person) : 50% (of PPL pay/ISK) = Profit ( 5250*14$ = 73.500$ income/month ?
Right mate, but seems their intentions laid off with those 50years of subscription pay out, seems they decided to close it off for good and it just caught up with a good enclosure then
I stand corrected. Maybe I’m still trying to fathom just how bad PA is for EVE. I mean like, ■■■■, I know how bad it is, I play BDO. But to EVE to become a trainwreck that is BDO, I’m can’t deal with the idea. Maybe never will.
Cause like you said, when EVE players vote with the wallet, that ■■■■ ain’t some magic voodoo after all. That, they really do.
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$73,500 < ---- with this value PA will throw EVE in the trash bin within the first 3 months.
EVE players only twice voted with wallets. Once passively, after Rubicon. Once actively, after the Summer of Rage. The first was substantial. The second marginal and only very temporarily.
As Hilmar said, no reason to take people voting with their feet seriously. It’s still a valid observation.
By tomorrow people will have vented, the AMA will have had careful preparation with fillers and question preps, things will be more mundane. In a week people will still be buying PLEX and skins while still farming injectors and skillpoints and what not.
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Erm?
CCP did’t sell EVE, the groups that own CCP are selling CCP.
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The mobile app should have been left in the hands of the players, historically we generally do a better job of out of game tools than CCP do.
My concern was porting to other platforms, especially console ports; they rarely end well and Eve deserves better than some shoddy rework for a platform that changes in proprietary ways every couple of years, unlike the PC where the x86 platform is a standard.
Besides… PC Master Race 
The first came the Chinese, now the Koreans …RUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
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HMMMMMM… But that means the group that owns CCP, might not intend to sell EVE and CCP does not know anything about this. From what I know, EVE is not the sole thing that CCP owns. There are a few other small things that CCP still actively owns. Who knows, CCP might have inadvertently inaccurately misunderstood what their group owners said.
There isn’t much to add, CCP earns 68 to 72 million $ in a year and their profit is around 5 to 7 millions, depending on how the year’s done.
An interesting fact is that PA and their 9.5 million players of BDO earn about 107 million $ per year… which means that unsurprisingly CCP’s (largely) subscription model brings a lot more money per player than BDO’s F2P/P2W.
Also, at 500 employees, PA is about as large as CCP was before Incarna.
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I used to think that developers had thoughts like that. But my wife played this game called The Secret World and some developers decided it would be cool to convert and complex MMO with lots of RP and ERP to an shooter. So they did and it sucked horribly.
According to the coming up time lime that CCP posted, they are coming out with 64-bit client now. I also took a look at the coming up, and it seems that there is an upcoming fall event, but the Christmas event this year has been cancelled.
Eve is well and truly screwed the Asian gaming mindset is way different to conventional western gaming culture look what happened when blizz did the lets go into china thing, we got panda’s for ■■■■ sake.
Mate I’m not sure I noticed the f2p term, but the game for the moment with rules to its mechanics is set well to build the environment, I mean we performed to create any story on that platform, and indeed we do need a boundary of rule set to form it.
I’m saying the rules we currently bounded is to set out the platform which is necessary, but the game is actually free environment and alive in term of it, it ps self efficient and be able to grow on its own.
Even in our real world there’s always boundaries and orientations towarded isn’t it, but it’s how it forms up the environment not like if they simply make up something out of market and given a price tag to it, I mean every thing happen has a result, at least it should be working don’t you think?
RIP Eve Online - oh well it was a good run…
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I haven’t looked too deep into previous ownership structure, in terms of who’s the owner of the owner of the owner and so forth, but I think you are right about the relative hands-off approach. Hilmar as CEO would have been chosen by the board and expected to deliver results.
Whatever these results were supposed to be back in 2004, it’s likely that this shifted towards the goal to sell the company. Hilmar personally held something below 10% of the company and unless he owns any of the larger shareholders, his say in the large-scale business decisions, such as opt for sellout, is limited.
In that sense it may look like a lack of exerting control/influence by previous shareholders, but it’s very likely that this isn’t a totally spontaneous move to sell out, but rather at least a mid-term strategic decision.
Think about all the layoffs: a company with less fix cost for instance in personel, looks more tasty to a possible buyer and it would also look even worse if directly after the sale a lot of layoffs followed. So it’s possible that the exertion of control by shareholders was there all the time, just a major part of the playerbase didn’t understand it.
It’s what @Zachri calls boiling the frog. Tiny steps at a time and people won’t connect the dots.
I see what you mean, but business is business. They’ll probably understand that an exact copy of what they did with BDO will not work with EVE. The playerbase of our game is far smaller and if they expect any profits, they can’t just switch to P2W from one day to the other. It won’t work in EVE, the game would simply collapse. This might be an option for them if it’s not the playerbase they’re after with their acquisition.
If they want to turn EVE into BDO, I’d expect them to first find ways to tremendously grow the playerbase before they show their hand.
It won’t be, it hasn’t been for a while now.