Stringing your players along like gambling addicts is one strategy to a profitable game. It isn’t however the only one. Instead of preying on human psychology and physiology with gimmicks and tricks, you can actually try to sell a good and challenging competitive game that people really enjoy playing. Sure, even here as a game maker you are going be partly peddling the illusion of winning, but there are people who can see behind the curtain and aren’t really satisfied by a game that makes you, and everyone else, a winner by fiat.
Eve started as one of these more challenging games, aspiring to be something more than a complicated slot machine designed to extract money from people. Where success was not guaranteed and a major part of the rewards offered came from the satisfaction you were playing a cut-throat game against other humans. Then, the powers-that-be decided that these players weren’t enough, and started flirting with (and milking) the casual masses who expect constant, uninterrupted progress and don’t handle well any loss - the farmer.
They did this for years, nerfing the competitive game and driving away their previous player base and replacing them with farmers who happily bought progress, or spent hours grinding safely to feel good about themselves. But you can only devalue your game like this for so long, and we reached the point last year a decision had to be made. Even the farmers were getting bored and were realizing how meaningless their progress was as everyone had basically everything.
So CCP reversed course. They will try the same play now, but in reverse removing safety and easy rewards, and putting some challenge and competition back into the game. This will cause some churn in the player-base, but they will still keep the most OCD of the farmers, especially those prone to the sunk cost fallacy, and be able to attract a whole new generation of competitive-minded players looking for a challenge. And this isn’t a bad time to make the shift given how underserved such players are by a game market full of overly monetized games targeted at a generation of coddled gamers who expect either a guaranteed win, or at least consequence-free losing.
That’s the plan anyway. CCP no doubt would love to have the best of both worlds and will still do what they can to pander to the farmers and the whales where they can get away with it. And of course CCP could botch the whole thing and start a fail cascade. But I am more optimistic than I have been in a long time that they are actually trying to point the ship in the direction that made Eve unique in the first place, and not in the same direction every other game seems headed. For much of the last decade Eve’s development was like a rudderless ship, blindly following all the latest corrosive trends and fashions of the game industry instead of blazing a new trail and doing things differently like the first decade of Eve. Now things feel different.
So keep at it CCP. Ignore the bleating of the farmers and continue your efforts to get this game healthy again, and there still is a way to go. Most of them will stay anyway, and even benefit from a more challenging, more meaningful game.