I was trying to figure out some launcher issues ( launcher won’t close on my MacBook without. force quit, on my windows machine it hangs my shutdown, so I have to close it via task manager too ) when I noticed this news snippet.
While I am not planning on playing Eve in a browser ( that’s just asking for tears ) I would love to know the rationale in dedicating dev time to this tangent, when there are many other parts of the game badly needing iteration and improvement.
Same reason why they made so many spin off games like Valkyrie, all of which were commercial failures.
Bad management.
Most companies use this to take the load off cheapo computers.
The thought being that if you don’t need to spend a fortune on a gaming rig, you’ll have lots of money to spend on mini DLC, lootboxes, merch, and all the other crap games as a service are pushing on players these days.
But why is CCP specifically doing it? Who the ■■■■ knows with these guys. They have a long legacy of not thinking things through before implementing them.
Browser-compatible means mobile device-compatible.
Means I can play EVE at the gentlemen’s lounge.
I’ll don my tinfoil hat for a moment and suggest they may be making this move as they plan to bring EVE closer to EVE Echoes, turning it into a 100% safe cookie clicker.
Obviously CCP has a spai in upper management hell bent on burning the company with moronic spin-offs.
Shitting on CCP aside, the real reason is asset diversity though. If something happens to eve, CCP as an entity is over without it, hence the diversification over the years through Dust 514, valkyrie 1 and 2 etc etc.
Everything that was on a dos / now NT based system is a browser if that is what you call it.
Well, not to beat up on you too much, but I’m getting tired of hearing this argument. I’ve heard someone say, “why is CCP working on X, when other things need to be fixed,” about damn near everything everything CCP has ever worked on (including things that I have personally cared about). They work on iteration, and players say they need to stop working on something no one likes and fix balance issues. They work on balance issues, and players say that obviously bugs should have priority. They work on bugs, and players ask why they haven’t fixed botting. And so on and so forth ad infinitum. Guess what -different players have different values and priorities, and what they devs chose to work on is not just based on what you personally think is most important, but on what delivers the maximum benefit to the most relevant stakeholders (players, devs, and investors) in the least amount of time.
Also, they are probably working on a Eve online in a browser for monetary reasons. As others have said, it would allow more people to play by allowing it to run on lower end machines and mobile devices.
Being able to play on mobile devices could conceivably be cool because it could allow people to update market orders, industry slots, and PI during moments of free time throughout the day, but the interface isn’t designed for touch screens. Of course, you can hook up a keyboard and mouse to many phones, but most people tend not to carry input devices and the necessary adapters around with them. IDK, maybe a stylus would be the way to go. Updating market orders could still be a real pain, but it might make doing industry and PI on mobile worthwhile.
@Shipwreck_Jones - I agree with you. But there is another couple of interesting wrinkles to consider:
If you deploy it as a streamed service through a Browser (and we know that can be done - GeForce Now supports Eve Online - and that’ll deliver to a Chromebook through a browser session, or to an App on a phone). then you have less worry about supporting a range of OSes, driver states, graphics capabilities and heaven knows what. You have a simpler development target.
Also, from cold you are in the game without substantial downloads - the world is moving towards “instant gratification” (really? for Eve? well, well, well…).
GeForce Now needs something like 10Mbps to run, this is the other end of the scale for Eve as a client where the network connectivity is surprisingly undemanding compared to a lot of games.
My first thought was around: why? given that Stadia and (especially) GeForce Now are the elephants in the room. But then, this may well be less a “CCP design and build everything and own a bunch of servers” and more using one of those platforms to provide a tailored service to the user - front it through www.eveonline.com but the heavy lifting is done by Nvidia - it may even be part of Nvidia’s business plan to provide such a service rather than fronting everything themselves: they already support Steam delivery through GeForce Now. Nvidia become the infrastructure bit of “games as a service” by publishers. Becoming for Games what Netflix is for the Film business.
Pretty disappointed to hear about this novelty.
I was extremely happy when Quake Live became actual game (left browser). Never expected such trend to return.
Well, maybe good for people with best internet.
Ultimately they can work on whatever they want but it does seem odd to put development time into this when they could probably spend a fraction of the amount and just partner with a streaming service that already delivers this.
Imagine for example if they partnered with Nvidia to allow an EVE only streaming tier where a user can only stream EVE but at a lower price, which they can then optionally upgrade to a full Geforce now sub. A win for both sides and they just split the cost of the disount rather than trying to jam EVE into a browser.
If CCP wanted this sort of functionality via mobile, they could just open it up via the ESI. Seems like it would be less work to have the 3rd party crowd take care of it.
You are right. I dislike coming onto the forums complaining, since I know what I am saying point to some soul deep in the bowels of CCP who may interpret that as think the work they are doing lacks value. If the problems you have listed were easy to fix, they would be done already and if it was just a matter of throwing bodies at a problem, fixes would be fast.
If there was one thing I wish I could change, it would be changing how internet is measured. 10 Mbps doesn’t tell me as much as “X ping to Y address is recommended” because right now, I have more than 10 Mbps but my ping is farcical due to geography.
CCP has problems with growing the player base and interest level in EVE. CCP does not appear to be overly aware of proper game design, market mechanics, their target market, or their actual player base.
When the teams at CCP are told by management they need to come up with ideas to increase interest in the game, they spitball a bunch of stuff at the whiteboard to see what sticks. “3D character interaction! Faction Wars! AI mining teams! Pirate bases that easily kill 80% of the characters they encounter! Resouce Wars!”. (Those are the ones that ‘stuck’, by the way, you’ll have to imagine your own supply of ‘ideas too bad for CCP to consider’.)
Then they can all draw paychecks for another 6 months while they do a half-assed job of implementing whatever the new idea is, toss it live without QA, spend 6 months apologizing for the bugs in it and saying “we’re all working triple-overtime to get this fixed for you, our beloved players!”, and then quietly forget the whole thing and cobble together the next big project.
I’m not sure how anyone at CCP put “the type of players who play EVE plus the type of complicated, awkward interface EVE uses plus the need for extremely short client-server response time plus CCP’s inability to get even chat working properly” and boiled that down to “Yes, browser play is what we need to reach more of our target market!”.
Of course, CCP could also be planning to dumb EVE down to the point where the browser-play market is a suitable player base, who knows? At any rate, I expect this to be yet another initiative where they throw a years development resources away on a failed side project, while continuing to ignore the actual fundamental issues of the game that currently pays all the bills.