Eve is certainly “middle-aged” and past its prime. New players will still find some enjoyment, though not as much as they would have if they started playing 8-10 yrs ago.
I think the game is at a point where it is increasingly hard(^2) for Dev to keep the old players interested.
One other interesting point though; I’d suggest that a lot of the growth we saw 2007-2009+ came from players who had joined a couple years before getting second and third accounts for cyno alts, empire PvE alts, or super-sitting alts more recently.
CCP has never been very open with the player base as to how many “people” were active in this game. They only talked about PCU numbers. Regardless of what they said about the difficulty of getting that info it isn’t too hard to get a fairly good idea.
I think the “writing has been on the wall” for quite a while and CCP has seen this in their internal numbers, which would explain some of the Marketing adjustments they seemed to make 5-7 yrs ago, and more recently.
I think the “Eve is dying”, (or better yet, starving) crowd has been generally right since mid-late 2000s and it would be far easier to see if new “alts” was removed from the equation.
I don’t think real growth in new “players” is anywhere near what has been advertised with new “accounts”.
I think the sandbox nature of EVE becomes exponentially more significant to a player as they accrue wealth/SP/accounts/experience etc over years. When losses no longer matter and you can fly whatever you want, the meta-game starts to matter more and more.
For people who start caring more about the quality of fights than the number of killmails they collect, PVP could be a stable long-term motivator. Those players might only log in a few hours per week and just to PVP. It’s a good and viable alternative to the meta-game, as this could be boring for some established players.
It’s clear from your comments that you have no idea how a business works. Does it suck that some of CCPs staff are gone? Sure - for them, and I guess for you it mattered as well.
Yet those layoffs were likely necessary to get the company from a point where it was not making enough profit to where CCP is today (i.e. the best position they’ve ever been in, financially speaking). That’s how companies work. If you aren’t making enough to support those staff, you restructure - and layoffs are part of that.
EVE is a cash cow right now for CCP. It’s not going anywhere.
EDIT: And for those claiming EVE is “past it’s prime,” bear in mind that CCP released EVE in 2003. WoW was released in 2004, one year later, and remains the MMO with the most subscribers worldwide. So you are another part of the “wooo the sky is falling crowd.”
It’s clear from your incoherent rambling that you are a dev alt.
They may have saved a few million by laying off a bunch of folks, if this was how they got in their “best position” how would this be a good thing though
Most people online in 2017 was Januari
I think eve has awesome aspects but look the competition, start citizen has much greater promises
Actually, after the 2008 crash, many german industrial workers accepted pay cuts and fewer hours rather than being laid off, which allowed companies to avoid getting into debt by cutting back production while holding onto their skilled workforce, ready for when demand picked up again 5 years later. While they’re sometimes unavoidable layoffs are not the only solution.
So the argument you’re making is that CCP should have cut wages rather than lay off employees, therefore EVE is dying even though the company is profitable again?
The problem with that assertion is that you’re not an experienced developer, and the experienced developers working on this game are still developing it, constantly. And that’s not even to mention how many experienced gaming developers in the industry laud the game as a benchmark without peer.
