You should stop projecting your insecurities on others, it’s unbecoming of an intellectually honest human being.
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/r/iamverysmart
This isn’t reddit, fool.
Srsly though it’s not dying.
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Weren’t many of the layoffs within or after the timeframe they made their highest profit yet? If so, what does it tell us? As far as I remember CCPs public business report, there are not enough details to be found to really come to any conclusions. One assumption could be that layoffs regarding EVE Devs were done in order to hire more people for Project Nova. Anyhow, I think some people here don’t really want to discuss CCPs business strategy, but use this as a hook to continue their “EVE is dying” nonsense.
Wether this is an option or not depends on the structure of the company. They might rather get rid of entire sections that are too unprofitable, than to cut back on all areas equally. I don’t know which company you’re specifically referring to, but funny enough in many cases the managers kept their several million Euro income, while the wages of the workers were cut back.
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If you try to argue, at least get your numbers right, will you? The 2017 report on 2016’s financials showed record income -moslty due to extraodrdnary income like a 20 million $ investment for VR developments. That’s how it reached 81 million in 2016 as published in 2017.
The latest report (2018, about 2017’s financials) show a income of 64 mllon $, below the 71 million of 2011 or the 67-68 million prior to 2016’s record.
Also, since 2017’s report, CCP’s employees went down from 360 to 298, mostly because they sold (or tried to sell) the VR department at Yorkshire, plus firing their whole customer relations team (but Guard anf Falcon).
So, in other words, between 2016 an 2017 CCP income went down by 3 million $, they laid off 60 employees and killed the community relations team. I repeat: THEY KILLED THE COMMUNITY RELATIONS TEAM. That’s how well are the things going in CCP’s financials after introducing F2P, something the equally longevous and reviled WoW hasn’t done nor plans to do.
Now that you know the reality, try and spin it in a positive way…
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Hes not wrong.
CCPs numbers dont look all that good from an investor perspective.
And the stack of failed ventures just keeps growing. (Although it can be said that one success is built on ten failures.)
Will have to wait and see what happens with Nova.
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EVE AT BEST is stable. At worst, it is slowly dying but the players can’t know it. How much alpha accounts are in the game, nor how much are logged right now ? Hard to say…
For me, EVE is suffering for different bad decisions, a bad understanding of player psychology, and the inability to adapt.
Player psychology ? One thing you learn when you interact with people, is that “People hate losing”. We ALL hate losing, even if we pretend the contrary. In 2007/2008, there was already killboards but they was manually populated and so it was possible to cheat on that. When you lose a ship, you lose a decent amount of ISK, so why add more consequences than that ? API syndicated killboards are a strong incentitive to NOT undock, meaning less interaction and so less wars, and if you dare do whatever you want/dare play, you will have to take responsability from the directors depending of the corporation you are. If at least there was an option to anonymise the player name, I guess it would be OK…
Inability to adapt ? Player efficiency to generate ISK went up so much that now, capitals ships for exemple are like consumable stuff. It shouldn’t be like that. In general, big ships are supposed to be rare and hard to obtain. The most important consequence of this fact is that some alliance are just “too big to fail” and too big to attack, because this ships are somehow cheap. And territorial stability is bad for the game. Obviously, CCP didn’t expect that, and should raise the prices of all of them, at least X2 if not more.
Bad decisions ? There are some of them, sometimes very small but one small + one another + one another… For exemple, the raising of EVE consumption of computer ressources by the removal of the “Load Station Environment” followed by adding more shaders in stations, making stations more rssource-hogging than going outside (no joke, checked). For players who spend most of their time in stations, it is a serious issue who motivate to log less accounts. At best I had 3 accounts at the same time on 4 paid, now I have 1 on 2 because I don’t see why I should stress my computer and see my energy bill go up, just to see some blinking balls moving on a somewhat wallpaper covered by many windows because CCP decided that it was too hard to maintain… Less income for them. And this is only ONE bad decision on a full list I can give on the UX department who don’t seem important if taken alone but still are.
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These aren’t mutually exclusive but you can MINIMISE layoffs by opting for alternatives, such as cutting back the hours/wages of those skilled workers whom you’d prefer to keep employed. However, the workers must also agree to this.
Which companies are you refering to because I’ve seen no evidence for this claim?
Yep and it only works if the business model allows for such steps. If you’re producing cars and you’re selling less than expected, you can decrease hours/wages of many workers. If your product is access to a game, you might be able to do so as well, but I think not quite as much, because you’re not producing quantities.
SAS, VW for instance. I’d have to look deeper into that, but I remember this almost always being the case - situations were managers cut back on their own wages seem to be the exception.
Valkyrie and DUST 514 were separate projects so it’s understandable that people working on them were laid off but CCP also fired their entire community team, which was arguably unnecessary.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7aekcb/exccp_developer_makes_statement_after_massive/
This is just another claim, not evidence. From what I saw in the press at the time the opposite was the norm in SMEs which make up the majority of German companies.
This is a separate issue from workers hours/wages but again I disagree.
It was certainly bad, I’ll agree on that.
Ah okay, I was talking about big business. SMEs usually don’t have real managers, they have owners who are often deeply involved in the processes of the company or positions called “managers” which are not the same as managers for a stock-traded business. The bosses in SMEs usually have a much tighter personal binding to workers and vice versa, so I see that they might cut their own wages as well. In large companies, managers get boni payments for layoffs or convincing the workers to agree on wage/hour decrease.
If anybody thinks Hilmar the Red will take a pay cut before every possible person to fire has been fired, think again.
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That’s not in doubt here as I don’t think anyone claimed these redundancies were a good thing. The question was whether they were (all) necessary. I’m not sure they were.
While large companies typically get the most attention (especially in the USA) in Germany their “Mittelstand” make up over 90% of businesses, so it’s their health which determines economic growth. (Mittelstand - Wikipedia)
CCP now has several hundred employees but is still comparable in size and structure to such SMEs as most of its workforce is based in Iceland and the majority are local employees.
Please fix EFT (something is not a valid integer value)
You being good at the game will not help ccp with the need of real money or attracting new players. lol
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Attracting new players requires new skills, ships, missions and goals that a player will get in lost for many years.
Unlike the PvP only crowd if CCP allows the gankers to continue doing what they are doing both in game and on the forums by saying that those going against their PvP only agenda should have to purchase permits to use this forum to build a wealth base in the game people are not going to want to subscribe to Eve Online.
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Yeah, there are a few behaviors in this game that starve it of new players. The effect wasn’t so noticeable previously but I feel it will become far more apparent as time goes on.
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I agree.
The NPE of the game still starts players out in highsec and guides players into the mostly solo careers of mining and missioning. This, on top of years of nerfs to highsec PvP and content creation resulting in a game that bores most new players out of the game before they either connect with a group or appreciate the interconnectedness and greater possibilities of living in of New Eden.
As this inertia takes hold in highsec where the new players get their start, it only makes sense their will be a noticeable decrease in retention of new players.
An empty and safe highsec does not make for a very compelling first impression nor fairly represent all the cool stuff there is going on in this game.
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