Collision is definitely horrible. Many of the stations have hitboxes that defy all logic.
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That’s not really true, because in most games with most players when you ban someone for this sort of behavior, or warn them, or whatever, it stops. The same goes for the few things Eve doesn’t allow based on CCP’s own data that they’ve shared in various fanfest presentations (on botting, RMT, and the like).
Your base assumption here is that the level of ethically questionable behavior in the game would remain constant were it banned, but in practice there’s no way that would be the case. Plus if Eve was less harsh it’s almost guaranteed that it would be more popular, so CCP would easily be able to afford more Customer Reps to deal with the small uptick in ticket volume.
That’s something of a false equivalence here. One, ‘butts in seats’ is not equivalent to PCU. You can have 500k subs and drop PCU by roughly half just by cutting the average player’s play time per week in half. Also Eve, like most MMOs these days, has secondary income streams besides subs. You may have missed it, since you were away, but CCP said that Eve had its most profitable year ever last year.
In short…
Come on bro, you think CCP is gonna admit they’re experiencing a loss of income ? The fallout from that would be really bad.
DUST was closed when it stopped being profitable, and it was f2p, people didnt stop playing it. EVE is f2p also. Alphas can contribute to PCU the same as subscribers.
CCP had profitable year because of VR games sales. But there was investment of 30M $ before. So now they had to update these games so they dont need VR to play. EVE income is lower and lower year by year from 2013.
As long as EVE stays profitable, they will keep servers open.
Yes, I do, because that’s exactly what they did… lol.
Literally 30 seconds on google:
DUST was, as far as I know, never profitable for CCP. There are plenty of reasons for that, but most of those still boil down to not enough players. Generally the “conversion rate” of free players into paying players for free to play games is pretty predictable, so you can look at your total playerbase and figure out how much you’re going to make. If DUST had more players it likely would have been profitable and would have stuck around.
Note, the above doesn’t really apply to Eve because most of Eve isn’t Free to Play and Alphas are similar to the WoW unlimited free trial that prevents you from leveling past a certain point.
Except if you read the blog post that guy wrote about his 2016 analysis he flat out admits that he doesn’t know the exact numbers for each game and the per-game breakdown there is purely speculation on his part. That speculation doesn’t match the other information we have, both from CCP and from third parties, so it’s probably incorrect.
That is still the best what I have seen. If you have better sources, give them.
Guessing is not a “source”.
How about the second of the two articles I linked in that reply which is CCP literally flatly contradicting that speculation.
Its a valid analysis. Alternatively you can ask CCP why they are so secretive. 
According to the story, CCP Games saw a revenue increase of 30% in 2016, with daily active users (DAU) for EVE Online doubling during the reported period. The total revenue sum for the company is $86,135,976.
Its for whole sales, not only EVE. As Alphas can contribute literally zero to the CCP financials and they are there just for PCU, what analysis takes into account is subscribtions and sales of VR games. As revenue from subscribers is what counts for EVE, and some PLEX sales, and active PCU number is tied to subscription numbers and Alpha accounts, and as you can see PCU is where it was year before, because Alphas came and went, I think analysis is fairly on point. But thats of course subjective.
Believe me, I would like to see other numbers across the boards. More positive.
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Keep reading, they said that one of the major factors was skill trading and another was Citadels combined with the more open access model of the game. Also, on that last part, Alphas can convert into paid players over time.
Also the flat title of the article is that the profit jump was because of Eve Online.
On top of that we have the current price of PLEX, which has to be driven by demand somewhere, so it’s not like there’s much evidence against Eve being the majority of that 30% bump here.
Oh there’s also this article over at massivelyop: http://massivelyop.com/2017/02/28/eve-online-saw-big-bump-in-players-and-profits-in-2016/
That flat out says that the VR titles only broke even in 2016.
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I think this is just Hilmar being balsy, like always. And article title is assuption, all your thinking is assumptions. CCP doesnt provide numbers for EVE, but for everything. More probable is that CCP is hiding a bad number in big number. Or VR title sales were really bad for what was invested (30M $). If that would be truth, they would not go further in VR branch. Meanwhile they released SPARC that have nothing to do with EVE! 
EVE is still their powerhorse so they have to feed it at least halftruths if anything else is not available. Its like standard CCP for you. Vague to the point of ridiculous.
I want to see numbers for EVE only. Other games doesnt interest me. “BUT WHY NANA?”
To confront my assumptions and to see if me being pesimistic results in a nice surprise when I will see big numbers, or nice surprise because I was right. 
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So, what you’re saying is that you’re willing to take the wholly unsupported assumptions of a random guy running a blog with no special knowledge or even a particularly good analysis over the word of the company whose report he is summarizing and extrapolating from as well as at least two separate journalistic enterprises that have reported basically the same thing, basically because it fits your narrative…
That’s a load of horse hockey, frankly.
You have your evidence, you’ve just chosen to ignore it because it’s more fun for you to be cynical.
Also, regarding CCP’s VR endeavors. Eve Valkyrie only launched on PC part way through 2016, and on PS4 towards the end of that year, and Oculus has only shipped about a quarter of a million units so just the fact that it’s breaking even isn’t bad considering you’re looking at a market of around a million people total there.
Oculus is not everything, there is also VR on ps4. So its bigger market. For amounts of games sold and how they were priced, I think its a good assumption.
And I would always make that assumptions over what media who feeds on words alone of a compromised management writes in titles of their articles. I am always taking the negative aproach for CCP because of my experience with their wording and management style.
I can be happy-go-lucky when it comes to gameplay, but watching how CCP handles everything is a pain to watch and you develop low expectations for this company over the years.
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Valkyrie wasn’t even out on PS4 until almost the end of 2016, and that “market of a million people” was including all Oculus and PS4 VR sales through the end of 2016 per the article I linked.
This is needlessly cynical and way off base. What CCP is saying matches up with what they’ve released publicly and would have been easily verified by showing the reports in question internal documents under NDA.
On top of that CCP has no reason to lie about how Eve is doing financially. If their VR games made 20-30m in profit that would be huge and both they and their VR partners would be trumpeting that to the moon and back. Given that Valkyrie costs $40 then 30m in profit would, even assuming CCP gets 100% of the money from each game (which isn’t going to be the case) represent 750,000 units sold. That’s a lot of games especially in a relatively new and niche market like VR.
Quite frankly I’ve found this to not be the case. I see people develop cynical expectations, but that’s generally because they’re uninformed and overly optimistic in the first place. If you take the time to learn how game dev works and how companies talk then you can maintain fairly realistic expectations.
For example, companies will basically never lie about money, especially with any kind of specifics, since those lies are generally not that hard to expose, and in most countries misleading shareholders about company performance is a crime.
I had too much optimism in me I know. Now I dont see the difference between EA and CCP. They dont lie to you, but they dont tell you the whole truth either. If that dont raise any of your eyebrows, I dont know what could. Valkyrie cost was 60 $ nearly at launch and had microtransactions, and it was included in financials I am sure.
When it comes to expectations, you should know why they talked VR so extensively at fanfest about EVE. They recently made it so you dont need VR to play Valkyrie. They reach to EVE players pockets in all ways possible. 
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I don’t think it’s CCP who made Jita the main market hub, it was the players themselves. As I understand it, Jita is at an intersection of some regions, so it was a convention location for traders to set up. With just a few jumps, they could manage Buy/Sell orders in a few regions. The people congregating there made it eventually made it into a market destination for both shoppers and sellers. (Like the way in Metropolis you go to Hek to shop, and while you’re at it, sell you loot. You don’t go to Pator, because probably not all of the stuff you want will be there). Eventually, the size and scale of the Jita marketplace attracted more and more commerce, so that it became what is now.
The smaller hubs Dodixie, Rens, Hek and Amarr happened the same way. But the momentum and multiplier-effect was already with Jita as the central marketplace, so they’ve stayed just local hubs.
Source: Forum post by a dev I saw a few years back
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None of this should be surprising. No game company is ever going to “tell the whole truth”. They always have to keep some of their information to themselves because if they lay absolutely everything out on the table people will draw erroneous conclusions and manufacture drama. Either because they’re applying a lot of ignorance to a little information (for example assuming that VR somehow made CCP 20-30m…) or because they’ve decided to be actively malicious for one reason or another.
This isn’t a CCP or an EA thing, this applies to every company that’s made every single game you’ve ever played.
Whether it’s finances, exact player numbers, what exactly is being worked on when, or any of a dozen other things. If you think you’re getting all of this from a game company you’re not.
Yes? And?
Again, not an EA thing, just a games industry thing. Games are really freaking expensive to make and Devs have this weird thing where they want food and have families with expenses and generally want to be paid on time and spend time with those families rather than working a second job.
There are only two types of game companies that I’ve seen that don’t keep an eye on their budgets and generally try to sell their games to people. Ones that are going to fail horribly, and ones that are very new and haven’t burned through their funding yet. This second type will either learn to manage their budgets or they will eventually turn into the first sort.
I suppose the bad practices of including micropayments averywhere and freaking horse armors DLC’s made it into mainstream and look perfectly normal. And if you treat your clients better you are automatically seen as a player friendly game company like CD Projekt Red or Rockstar.
I’ll trade you my elite dangerous account for…whatever you decide is fair. PM me. Eve > Elite Dangerous.