CCP at one point deleted all videos from their youtube channels, with the intent of reuploading everything in a (much) higher quality in order to remain consistent. This happened in around 2010 or 2011 i believe.
This however never happened: A large part of their video library simply went lost, including almost complete recordings of past Fanfests and Alliance Tournaments - Every single talk, match, discussion, stream recording, gone.
However, the recordings of Fanfest 2008 were found very recently: Crappy quality, but itâs better to have them than to not have them. Hereâs the playlist:
Of particular note are a two talks:
Walking in Stations
Thereâs a fairly extensive gameplay demo of WiS in this talk. Itâs really interesting how CCP went from that, to only captainâs quarters 3 years later with Incarna. Bleeding edge tech - For the time - Was also there.
World Domination
The âCCP Presents!â of back then. The unbridled ambition on show there seems to have been lost over time. Especially CCP Oveurâs talk at the end shows a direction the company never really seemed to have actually taken in the years afterwards, for whatever reason. Particularly interesting is the teaser footage of Dust 514 near the end, with no comment made as to what it is, almost a year before the game was actually announced - No one knew what they were looking at, and everyone believed it was âjust a conceptâ (which i guess it was).
I donât know about anyone else, but i really miss the CCP on show here. Where did all the raw ambition go?
That was around the time I started, and part of the reason I started was because EVE was a big game with big plans.
Being honest though, there were a lot of people at CCP who perhaps hadnât had enough experience at developing, designing, and implementing MMO challenges of the nature they were looking at. I expect there were a lot more âgood ideasâ than there was ability to implement them. And then CCP started bringing in a lot of money and going off on projects which they also couldnât implement.
Creative types start getting antsy and looking another job when theyâre constantly told âSorry, great idea but we canât really do that yet. Sorry, great idea but we started work on it then got interested in something else so it got shelved. Sorry, really great idea but we just spent the whole budget acquiring a really cool but completely unrelated property which we also donât know how to manage. Sorry, but we derailed that really cool new property to make them all work on some bells and whistles for our cash cow, because our players are rebelling.â
A few years of that, from 2008-2012 ish, and you see they changed into a company that was basically just trying to figure out how to get more players to pay for more subs. And thatâs where the decline began.
