The last numbers available say CCP earned 86M dollars in 2016 much of that profit. Almost all of that was from Eve putting Eve Online amongst the most successful video games on the planet in terms of profit.
So profitable they were just bought for 425M. Sure, CCP and Eve aren’t comparable to the top tier of games or studies which earn billions, but I would still consider any game of Eve’s size raking in tens of millions of dollars profit a year as “massively profitable”.
Actually 2016 showed sales of just under 50 million dollars for EVE Online, a drop of 6.5% from the year before and equalling approximately the revenue from 2009 from EVE Online. The balance sheet is ( as of 2016) healthy, but I’m not convinced that 2017 was a banner year for them. 2017 numbers are elusive; anyone have them available?
50 of the 86 is EVE. And remember, they were bought for up to 425M. They have to hit certain performance targets to get the full amount. And yeah, you might consider it massively profitable, but by the standards of its competition… it’s ‘profitable’. That’s it.
The fact Pearl Abyss paid $225M plus bonuses means CCP is still making tens of millions of dollars a year. We can all decide for ourselves what that means in terms of history, but it doesn’t change the fact those are very healthy profits for a company of this size.
Eve is doing just fine. The prayers of the Carebear Contingent that Eve will fail financially and they will get the game changes they pine for are as ethereal as ever.
And has assets worth $225M that they’re pretty confident they can carve up and sell off, if they have to. Remember, they openly said they want to learn some things from CCP. What they’re after isn’t just EVE itself, it’s ‘how to’. How to build the most insane servers in gaming, maybe. How to run a single-shard game. How to make microtransactions work for a western audience with only minimal bitching and moaning. Who knows what it was, but they paid for expertise, too.
Maybe when Eve was younger you could argue non-intervention, now its wilful ignorance if no recognition is given to the fact a 3 month old corporation of casuals will have little traction against a 3 year old corporation packed with multi-boxing bitter veterans.
Incumbents have too much wealth, too much power, the balance is too much in their favour. Social Corporations don’t seek to change the balance, only exempt a section of the community from the result of the imbalance.
You’re right. Look at how many companies Facebook and Microsoft buy up and then pilfer their tech to integrate into existing products.
Sounds like a cop out to me.
I’d start wondering if this isnt something that should go under corp leadership skills.
Need an active corp leader. Train social corp skills first, need anchoring as a pre, move onto wardec corp skills and then the ability to anchor M/L/XL structures for the Corp with the skills.
That won’t stop people obviously but it does set a clear indication that you need some experience. And if you set some other benchmark skills for the leader for anchoring structures that aren’t common for newbies you will have a bit less of this. Especially if they are combat based skills to some degree.
Then lose the leader, unless your new one has the skills stuff unanchors into corp escrow/a set safety of some kind. (or maybe just unanchors in space but that could be a bit harsh depending where the structure is maybe what happens is based on sec of the system).
I’m on phone but could probably flash this out a bit more on the computer if there was sufficient interest in taking a deeper look at this idea.
Tldr version. Make corp leadership need skills on the character. Make some of those skills tied to structure anchoring ability.
I’m just trying to get an idea of where EVE is heading before I spend more money on it. To do so, I need to look beyond the fluff that CCP devs put out for upcoming changes. I need to see what the data shows in moving the company one way or the other.
Part of found data:
The addition of more code into EVE (reportedly done at Into the Abyss) has allowed devs an opportunity to better granulate and parse information down to get a better understanding of the current and near past results from current gameplay and the established mechanics. Information over at least the last 4 months (maybe even far longer) shows that wardecced corporation members (no matter their general experience level) tend to leave the game entirely following even only 1 week of WD at a far higher rate than non WD corporation members do.
A small group of players are having a highly disproportionate effect on declaring WDs, resulting in a much higher loss than gain in player population from the current mechanic.
New player creation charts show that the daily origination of new characters has fallen to near pre-alpha introduction levels; this means that even if we combine Omega and Alpha (non paying account) newly created characters today, they barely equal/surpass that of when they had all paying customers. Less Omega accounts, less money coming into CCP.
2017 CCP financials not yet available, but 2016 shows a healthy sheet. 2017 (and so far 2018), however, was a year(s) where fundamental changes were made, like going ftp, closing/selling the VR division, shutdown of DUST 514, handoff of Serenity server to Chinese, and more. No matter what the final financials show, however, will it be not able to equal or even come close to the success of PA in rate of return in recent years. Success the company heads in Korea assure us will continue.
200 million dollars is the reported incentive package offered by PA. Incentive for what, is the big question. Player retention? Creative talent retention? Higher profit return? Sales growth? Whatever it is (are), its worth 200 million to PA to make sure it happens the way they want it to go. That is a lot of incentive(drive) to make it so.
PA through BDO has achieved huge financial gain through large amounts of in game monetization, so much so that certain aspects of the game remain behind a paywall of one type or another. PA will try in some form or another to stimulate growth (financial or not) in EVE, so that future increases in revenue meets their target numbers. To do so, EVE mechanics will have to move toward BDO current business model. The goal in most business models is to buy a so-so company and either strip mine it or turn it into a far better money making corporation.
TL;DR: What’s in the future for EVE? Besides changes,just like everyone else, hell if I know! CCP management and devs have never been the most logical in regards to future plans. Just remember this: Hilmar and the “Greed is Good” memo. Stay tuned for Hilmar Unleashed!
Serenity was always run by a Chinese licensee, they just changed who that was.
This will have no effect on the loss of players due to wardecs in HS, as the problem that needs fixing.
SP in Corp forming or structure anchoring does not mean they are any more competent to defend against overwhelming wardecs.
It absolutely does.
It presents a higher barrier of entry to making a corp, which while SP does not mean player skill, does help filter out the pool of CEO’s.
Especially when if you bothered to read I was suggesting that the progression be into social corps first then into full corps, which makes it much clearer inside the client that going to a ‘full’ corp is a higher level of risk, and people starting up a group with friends are likely to initially enter into a social corp as it’s fast to train into.
Putting useful pre requisites for full corps additionally means they are likely to have some ability to fight back rather than just being a group of ventures when they are a full corp as well.
Short word version. Skills make corp better.
What evidence do you have?
SP doesnt make anyone better.
And now we know you are trolling, since you are replying to me with statements that I said in the very post you are quoting.
Aka, Get lost Salvos.
The financial statements for 2016 demonstrably show CCP made more than $25M in real profits. Not all of that was from Eve, but most was. Even if you assume a good chunk of the price paid was for the IP and “expertise” and PA overpaid some with an earning multiplayer of say 15, then CCP is still making tens of millions of dollars a year. And depending on how that additional $200M performance bonus is structured (how much is tied to the performance of Eve Online as compared to the other CCP products) that implies an even a higher profit stream from the game is expected.
And even ignoring all that, we have a market price for CCP now: $225M-$425M as that is just what someone paid for them. For a video game company of ~300 people, that is a lot of value, regardless of whether that value is in profits, IP, “expertise”, or potential growth. CCP and Eve Online were in no financial danger whatsoever. If there is any danger now, it is that they are at the mercy of new owners who are a game company that may decide to meddle with the game design at some point.
Let’s focus the discussion on more relevant metrics we have a better sense of, like player activity, than the abstract notion of “profits” which for a game company are influenced by many factors unrelated to the quality of the game itself.
I agree. Making a space for newer players to play in a group can only be good for the game. There needs to be some space for new entrants to grow, and the growing power discrepancy, made worse by things like Skill Injectors is a real problem.
But this incumbent advantage has been there since almost the beginning. New players have always been hugely disadvantaged to large groups of entrenched veterans and will always be. In any PvP contest there will be winners and losers, and while I agree there should be ways to play the game in a largely safe way (and there are), the game is purposely designed so that it hangs your cheese out in the wind as possible content for the other guy by dangling rewards - like highsec moon belts - in front of you.
@Iowa_Banshee was going full “think of the children” on us because a corporation lost some Athanors. CCP is never going be able to balance around this - people need to lose stuff all the time. At best they can give a safer space for players who don’t want to take that risk, but risk vs. reward how an open world game is balanced and if players choose to take on additional risk for additional reward, and another player calls them on it and beats them, then the game is working as intended. We don’t need to have a tag-day sale every time someone loses something in a PvP game.
A social corp, NPC stations, ice, ore, missions and sites are accessible in a highsec free of capital ships and there for newer players. These all exist or should exist. There should also be ways, like deploying structures, that players in highsec can opt-in to additional risks for additional rewards to ease into competition with other players. None of this is broken, but I’ll agree that this space should be tended better, given it is where new players are released into the wild.
But the apparently growing power gap between existing players and new players is a real problem that I have no idea how CCP will address. I was hoping it would be via Seagull’s new space to colonize which with CCP could do a partial reset of the existing power in the game, but since the last expansion my hopes that we ever get that are fading. Something radical will be necessary, or the game will become increasingly stratified and stagnant. The “go join a nullsec newbro corp” helps somewhat with this putting some new players immediately on the side of one of the existing power blocs, but it seems the game has never been more rough on new independent entrants.
I think the only reasonable quick-fix is social corps or similar to give them space to play together, but this isn’t a complete solution to a problem that seems to just be getting worse.
That assumes profit is the performance being measured. It’s possible some of it is in the form of growth, or other metrics.
No, they were in the danger of being at the mercy of owners who were not a game company, but a bunch of VCs and at least one investment banker. Owners, it should be pointed out, who had been looking to sell for almost a year, if not longer.
You know, I heard this a lot when there were still open plans about ‘maybe new space’, and I have to ask: How do you think that would have helped? What would have kept the existing blocs from going into that new space, with all of the advantages of out-of-game coordination, years of experience, and sheer manpower bring?
Because… I think the ‘new space’ people were talking about? We’re already seeing it. One of the under-appreciated aspects to EVE’s storyline is that the things we’re seeing now are not the result of radical new ideas that someone at CCP had in the last 5 years and thought ‘yeah, let’s change direction and go there’. I’d have to dig around in the archives of several blogs to find the original references, but… the Trigs? The Drifters? The Abyss? Near as I can tell, CCP’s been waiting to unveil some of these parts of the ‘big story’ for over a decade.
That ‘new space’… was probably the Abyss. And we’ll slowly be more ways to access it and explore, but I don’t know that they’re ever going to do another Anoikis and inadvertantly give us new space to settle.
Nope. As pretty much everyone except one or two individuals who know who they are has said: this is a big, complex issue that extended well beyond highsec wars, and the solution’s going to need to address root causes as well as symptoms.
You’ve missed the point.
You are being pedantic. Profits correlate with growth, player numbers, player activity or whatever “performance” metrics were agree to.
The bottom line is CCP and Eve are highly profitable.
Ok. Sure.
That doesn’t change the fact the balance sheets looked good, nor the larger point that brought about this discussion: Eve isn’t dying so invoking “Eve is dying” as a reason to make drastic changes to the core game is specious.
Sure, Eve can always do better, but @Iowa_Banshee was playing the ‘Eve Online will fail financially unless players are given a safe space’ card, the same one that has been tossed about by carebears since 2003. Eve is still doing just fine no matter who the owners were or now are.
Clearing the slate, declaring bankruptcy if you will on the game balance and resetting things would have several benefits. First, it would allow deployment of a more sustainable game design, one that perhaps favoured player activity more than accumulated assets and with minimum difference between old players and newer ones. Second, it would produce a land-rush of player activity as people stake claims to this new stuff, not only to grab the new space and things, but would motivate those who have given up on competing as they feel too far behind. Third, it would provide objectives for the existing powers to fight over, perhaps cracking some of the comfortable alliances and creating interesting content.
Of course, I agree, it is a bit more like shaking up the snow globe than resetting things. I have no doubt the current powers with the largest numbers and organization would quickly start to pull ahead and dominate things again, but at least it would temporarily close the gap and create another race, and regardless if the new steady state reached in a few years looks very similar to the current one, it would have driven player activity. And even if it an illusion, newer and smaller groups would be motivated by the idea the actually have a chance to dominate things and they really would during the initial land rush at least.
The alternative is pretty grim to be honest. If the current trends continue, we are going to have an entrenched king of the hill that no one is even going to attempt to dislodge, if we don’t already. CCP is going to have to shake the snowglobe somehow are we are in for gradual descent into stagnation.
Let’s hope you’re right and the Abyssal space is just the start of great things ahead and not just the instanced PvE and arenas I fear it is all it will amount to. And let’s hope CCP gets there sooner rather than later if it is.
And you clearly missed the multiple times I told Proteus that I’m a pedantic jerk! 
But at least I own it.
Sure, it would wipe the slate clean and favor player activity more than accumulated assets… but then you have to ask yourself what favoring player activity looks like, ultimately. Well, it’s gonna mean you need people paying attention to what’s going on, rather than AFKing, right? So let’s look at where the current model generates people paying attention over AFKing in terms of their constant, hours-long moneymaking[1].
Well, that’s not VNI/Ishtar ratting. It’s actually supercarrier ratting. Rorq mining actually requires more attention than hulk-mining (you burn through rocks faster). So the players who are more likely to put the time in on that land-grab are the same ones who are currently the most organized, with the best track record of analysis and planning.
So yeah, we would ‘quickly start to pull ahead and dominate things again’, only now all of those people who are currently saying they’d be able to do better if things were reset… wouldn’t have even that to hope for.
Not gonna lie: we might already. At least, for the foreseeable future. But I think if you look at the state of things in null (for example) and see a ‘steady state’, you’re overlooking a lot of potential. There is space for the taking. There are plenty of groups out there who aren’t really able to hold the space they’ve got, and there’s groups out there living near them who’d be more than happy to help new guys come in and shake things up.
Aegis sov has made holding large amounts of space you don’t use pretty untenable, really. Unfortunately, it’s also made trying to take sov a grind and a half that serious isn’t worth the work on its own merits. You’ve got to have a reason to want that sov, if you’re gonna get people to actually put in the entosis grind.
But null’s not the only part of the game, and the rest of it’s getting pretty damned stagnant, too. FW’s been a decade of Sisyphean rock-rolling on all fronts. Eventually, even the most ardent of little kids does get tired of a see-saw.
Something’s gotta give.