Assembly Hall

CCP is one of the few (only?) game publishers that have, for years, embraced and supported third-party tools and robust community sites, and it's paid off tremendously for them. The API allows third-party developers to create innovative and helpful tools for the player base. For the very small cost to CCP of maintaining an API, you the player have your choice of killboards, skill managers, and loadout tools. Have you looked at the fansite list? There are dozens of insanely fun and powerful sites that support EVE Online - all enabled by CCP's API.

These tools and sites support and help drive EVE's growth over the years. There's no way to accurately count this, but consider: BattleClinic serves 1.9 million hits a month and 45,000 people visit the site daily, on average. We estimate that EVEMon has been installed 2.5 million times. I imagine other popular tools like DOTLAN Maps and EVEBoard can boast similar stats.

Now, here's why these numbers are meaningful: At least a few times a week, and typically more often, a player will make a post on BC or a note from our 'contact' page or a tweet or whatever, stating they're subscribing / converting to paid / coming back after hiatus. Why? Because 'EVEMon helped lower the initial learning curve'' or 'got hooked on climbing the killboard rankings' or 'got the help they needed on a loadout that kept them playing instead of rage-quitting in frustration' or 'mucked about in EFT and got excited to fly a new ship.' And this list of course is endless. Multiply these sentiments by all of the people who did the same thing, but didn't post about it. I argue it's hundreds, perhaps even thousands every month that subscribe or come back to EVE because of the community sites and tools.

You could argue many of my examples above could be just as easily served by an in-house app. But economically why would that make sense for CCP?

• It would cost money to develop - costs that are currently being borne by the community.
• It would put the burden of updating and introducing new functionality on CCP, which increases costs.
• It would eliminate choices for the player and stifle innovation. CCP devs don't operate in a vacuum; they watch the community sites and take away feedback and new ideas.
• It would frustrate players because CCP can't just add features and try them out--they would have to put new features through an entire development process (probably SCRUM), meaning as good as CCP is, they just wouldn't be able to react as quickly to the community's ideas or desires.
• It would impact livelihoods (some community operators derive decent income from their sites, and most I know reinvest that income back into the site).
• It would impact EVE's SEO which drives player acquisition and retention.
• It would undercut EVE by giving rise to curse-dot-com sites that hack the client for their functionality.

A few years ago, CCP toyed with the idea of a licensing agreement, where community publishers could sell works derived from the EVE IP. At one of the meetings during Fanfest, I croaked my support (I had lost my voice talking to players at the BattleClinic booth). I argued that this would be a great idea because it would add economic incentive for community developers to make the EVE ecosystem even richer - but that it needed strong oversight. I volunteered to start or sit on a steering committee, but the idea seems to have gone the way of walking-in-stations So my friend, if anything (and I've argued this for years), the tiny cost of maintaining an API has yielded unquantifiable innovation which drives subscriptions and retention. That seems like good ROI to me.

Left un-discussed in my reply:

• Your argument for EFT, EVEHQ, Pyfa etc to be integrated into the client is counter-productive to CCP's business model. They want you to spend time in the game (improves subscription revenue) and they want you to sink ISK experimenting (improves ETC -to- PLEX sales). There, I said it.
• A private killboard is worthless; just put a mirror over your monitor if you want to admire yourself