CCP_Seagull stated very clearly all her reasons for her career move in an interview, the main ones being working with an exciting company that allows her to move back to her home country where all of her family and most of her friends are.
And here is her in own words her Farewell post in the forums, saying the same thing …
Eve is already p2w imo most people that’s been omega for ages don’t even know what skills are blocked from alpha players. I went alpha a few days ago just to see what I can access as a “new player” I do only exploration and as for the skills in the scanning department 98% of the skills is locked for alpha players even the skills I’ve unlocked as an omega are now locked and I’m failing relic sites like I did when I just started so eve had crossed the line to p2w a long time ago imo. As for this news about ccp selling or merging whatever they doing it’s now made me think twice about extending my omega time I’ll be holding on now.
In life I vote with my feet or with money, I have loved Eve long time. Would rather have real leverage with investment than BS CSM, with no real leverage over a company.
i wouldnt really say that is p2w considering the game was sub based from the start
alphas i think were intended more as an extended trial account
so i would say its more pay2function than pay2win
I would like to wish both parties the best with their new endeavors, and hope that they continue making this game great to play.
This topic seems pretty solemn to be honest. Some of the comments about a community funded Pearl Abyss acquisition made me go check what they currently trade for.
According to https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/263750:KS, only $US 40,142,762.56 (40 million) after the acquisition of CCP.
I remember when CCP used to take in more money than that over the course of a few months. With that in mind CPP either wanted to transfer the business or seriously needed to for some reason.
Perhaps they will elaborate more on the reasoning behind it, but I think we should all be enjoying the fact that we get keep playing this awesome game with integrity still intact.
You and I are on the same page here, I suspect an announcement within a year, unless Hilmar staying to lead the company for a certain time was part of the deal. Something we’ll never know.
Absolutely, if they can sell the plan to investors, there is no doubt this could succeed. Investors would see how PA has expanded BDO and imagine they could perform the same magic on a stagnant MMO like EvE. I suspect going public is very much on the table. Think about it, EvE used to be twice as large as it is now, yet it still makes money. It’s not potential, but proven history that this game has supported a larger number of players. Investors would be gambling that PA can replicate the magic that once was……
In fact PA stock rose over 4% yesterday, investors apparently are assuming some changes…
It’s not speculation, since they announced the sale for $425m. This is not something that happens over night and the amount doesn’t scream emergency-sellout. At some point the goal became to sell the company. When exactly that happened is unknown, and I never claimed it happened prior to 2012,but it’s likely that this option became the go-to at least a year ago.
Well I don’t know if they had a bunch of other offers, but even if so, I’m somewhat convinced that Hilmar would have negotiated what is best for EVE or - if there was no other way - the least bad option. Keep in mind that EVE is a niche game with a difficult playerbase. Difficult as in: more than in other large games, players feel that they own the game and they often behave as if they own CCP. It’s not necessarily an entity that every game company sees much potential in. Heck, when EVE grew, it grew against all odds and while that has surprised and possibly inspired many other entities, the business was stagnating. This is not exactly something that lures in fresh VC.
As to the timing, I’m not sure if you had preferred for them to sell earlier or if you’d have wanted them to wait another 2 years with EVE slowly declining.
Keep in mind, that while the sale will mean change, it could have been the only way to put money into EVE again. We’ll need to keep a close eye on the announcements during the next months about upcoming developments.
No, if they have been working towards a sale for several years, the cutbacks are part of that no matter what. Sure, had some unforeseen event occured that brought thousands of players (back) into the game, things might have looked differently, but there is no reason to believe a company like CCP would approach either a projected sale or their own projects without at least a mid-term strategy. The great amount of layoffs created a large amount of insecurity amongst the playerbase and this was foreseeable, so assuming it happened without having a plan in the backhand, is assuming that CCP was steering without a plan and risked bricking their business over failed attempts to diversify. I don’t think this is a reasonable assumption after 15 years of experience.
Some of the former employees probably knew about specifics and maybe now they can talk about it. We’ll see.
It’s not an “evil plan”, simply leading players and the business to adapt over time. There is no sense - for anyone involved - in introducing absolutely drastic changes from one day to the other. Think about the possible reactions to introducing all of the following news in one day: Skill Injectors, Layoffs and the Sale. How would that look? Right. Now, it’s clear that they felt they had to shift towards the F2P model and we all know that this is a general trend, not only in the game industry. It has its roots in greater competition for customers under circumstances where more than ever outstanding liablities of others and assumed/projected future revenue create your net worth. Private Equity has more than enough options to invest in longterm, low-return undertakings - CCP was simply forced to adapt to the escalating global market forces. In other words: they had to somewhat adapt to projected profits other types of game companies offer to VC.
Let’s be realistic here. The customer is not king, despite CCP being such a lovely group of people who actually treated us very well. We should be fking grateful for them doing what they did for such a long time, rather than selling us out earlier. And they probably had better opportunities to do so, if that’s what they wanted. But no, they believed in themselves and rightly so. Now this might be it or may be not. Maybe this is just the next chapter and they’ll manage to reinvent themselves under the new ownership. I understand that there is a lot of reason to see this as unlikely, but if it was the only way to go forward, so be it. Everybody will have to decide for themselves once we can see what the next steps are going to be.
Simply that. Business is not first and foremost the fulfillment of peoples needs and wants, but to gain profits. This is not because people are greedy, but because of the inherent forces of how this economic system works. Try running a business without gaining profits, see how long this lasts. Of course outsiders will always think they know it all better. It’s always easy to give other people tips for how they should live their life or run their business. It’s always easy to pretend that it should be easy for someone to find another solution, if one doesn’t have to face the same obstacles.
Or shorter: there is no way to run a business without gaining profits and as CCP is a business, there was never the option to stay unprofitable in the long run to make players happy - even if CCP employees would have wanted that.
Yeah exactly, that’s what I said before. The motivation for PA to acquire CCP will go far beyond EVE and likewise, the motivation to sell CCP from Hilmars perspective will not be to “cash out”, but to have the opportunity to keep going.
Unfortunately you look at it from the wrong side. PA do not want old EVE players in EVE, they are old and over-consumed and literally pain in the ass.
PA want 9 500 000 BDO like players in NEW EVE Online ( PC and mobile version ).
All this tears from you makes me want to play BDO and ganker some fishermen. Can’t wait for them to implement suicide ganking once they realize that it has a positive influence for player retention as CCP has figured out.
Science > your dreams
Looking forward to your tears in the BDO forums. Oh wait you are probably already crying there as well about various shite
The question is: can they even achieve that with EVE?
Point 1 I don’t want to debate. Gameplay is already time consuming and putting some money into visuals won’t be difficult for them, so okay.
But Point 2: how are they going to attract loads of people to the game? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I can think about quite a few things that they’d have to do in order to even create the ground for such a potential. EVE being a single shard game is not going to work with millions of players. They’d need to change that. If they change that, a few fundamental parts of the game will not work anymore: actually the entire political game of players influencing each other. What then? What will replace that which is the most famous attribute of EVE? And what will happen to current players? Not that those couldn’t be 100% exchangeable, but we all know that EVE has a playerbase that can bite. Let’s be realistic: if they fck us over too hard, there will be repercussions in a dimension that they can’t even grasp. You see what is happening to CCP when just a few people are pissed off. Think about what happens, if PA devalues all our chars and assets, completely fcks over our accustomed game and its core mechanics.
Don’t you think things would then escalate from rage to protest to outright the largest negative image campaign any game company ¶ has ever faced? You see what players do in terms of in-game propaganda, out of game action and how well we are organized. Let PA fck us over and suddenly tens of thousands of players will have not spend their time playing the game, but have hours every day to play the meta-game against those who destroyed our game.