EVE General Discussion

I like this internet grammar argument where people take phrases and think that if you just mash the meaning of their individual words together it produces the meaning of the phrase, but that doesn't reflect how language actually works.

Nobody would consider Valkyrie a first-person shooter, because it isn't one.

Houm, how about David Reid, CCP's marketing director and de facto Executive Producer to EVE Online?



Capture the Flag, King of the Hill, Team Deathmatch... yes, those are *disctinctive* spacesim features...

"Left Hand, I don't think you have met Right Hand. "

One of the bloggers, a current CSM member, made it abundantly clear, in their opinion, what they think of CCP upper management. The word "failure" was prominent.

Id really love a link.

Here is my view.

CCP are still developing 4 separate products

Eve
Dust
Valkyrie
Legion

However they are doing so with less staff.

Also according to Nick Blood (CCP Dropbear) in the article the Guardian wrote, CCP Management drafted the help of the WoD Developers to help out with elements in Eve a number of times to met deadlines, a resource which no longer exists.

I do not see how any of this is good.

Spin it how you like, CCP are still in my opinion spreading themselves far too thin by trying to develop so many games at once but now with less staff at their disposal.

How many other companies try to develop 4 games simultaneously?

The only 2 that I aware off are Blizzard and EA and you can not compare CCP with either of these 2 behemoths.

EA reported a net revenue of $1.04 Billion in 2013 and Activision Blizzard reported $1.05 billion, so sure these 2 can do that.. CCP however can not.

Speaking generally, it's something of a fallacy to assume that more people on an engineering or software development project makes it go faster or makes it more effective.

Larger teams inevitably wind up under tremendous pressure to make key architectural decisions quickly so everyone can get to work instead of sitting around or wasting their time. However, especially in game development, there's a lot of benefit to having time to try things and evaluate architectural or gameplay ideas carefully. A smaller team makes doing this less costly.

As an outsider whose only knowledge about this stuff is what's been said in public, it seems to me that Valkyrie and Legion are being made by teams that are a lot smaller than WoD and Dust teams were for most of their development. This means that if they make some bad decisions, it's a lot less costly to identify and correct, and only after they have a great game do they ramp up to a large team to get a product out the door.

That's just a more efficient, better way to work, and notably it's how Blizzard does it (though not EA as much, and I think it shows in the quality of their products. EA's attitude seems to be "let's release something fast and maybe not so awesome today, then keep releasing versions of it and do the iteration that way.")

Well the idea of the small team approach I was talking about is to slow-burn for a long time to get things right. I have no idea how close that is to CCP's plan.

As for EVE, you have to consider that looking at last year's balance sheet (which I have, in detail) their cash flow position is pretty good. Their cash flow last year was somewhat negative but they could have multiple more years like that without running out of cash, and their recent layoffs may help with that cash flow situation somewhat, too.

None of this is a comment on the validity of CCP's plans. I'm just saying that, as an outsider, the choices they're making do point toward one possible way forward that would help address some of their big historical issues.

You're assuming an awful lot from very little information. There's no way to tell what rearrangement happened internally.



That was a great story, but it was a water cooler story from an anonymous person who was unhappy long-term about the process. First, it's not clear whether it actually happened the way it was described, and second, any company with 500+ employees will have a handful of ineffective leaders here or there. Assuming that story is representative of the company's management across the board is not realistic.

Sure, but you don't know what rearrangement happened internally. Maybe someone was reassigned to his role. Maybe someone else with some bandwidth took on his responsibilities additionally to whatever else they were doing. Your statement was "well they must have disbanded the team." My point is: you can't assume anything.



When I said "that makes a great story," sure, it fits a particular narrative, but how realistic that narrative seems is going to look different to different people, either in the company or outside.

As for Glassdoor, all the reviews look the same for all the companies I've ever worked for, and they typically say management is clueless but they loved their coworkers, including a prior employer of mine that made Forbes's list of "best companies to work for." People mostly post on there after they leave an employer, and many find it hard to empathize with senior management unless one has been one anyway.

People who boostrap companies from nothing, like the management of CCP did, are constrained to learn on the job. Making mistakes is necessarily part of that process, and there's a lot to master in running a company. Are they improving? Will they come up with a truly successful follow-up to EVE Online? I don't know, but you're not going to see the answer to that in stories from six or seven years ago, three-year-old reviews on Glassdoor.com, or discussion in these forums.

Edit: Regarding "that story doesn't fall out of the blue." I have seen specific examples of stories about manager behavior passed around the workplace for years until the embellishment entirely replaces what really happened. In one case I'm thinking of, the embellished story became understood to be true, and I only found out what really happened when I had a work-related reason to check on its accuracy. The "Pssshhh" thing has a lot of similarities to stories I've seen treated that way in other workplaces. These stories can wind up being a kind of passive-aggressive revenge against managers who have slighted particular people in more mundane ways. Doesn't make them accurate.

With all respect, a team that suffers 'burn out' is a poorly-managed team from the start. Programming teams know what they're capable of, and they know who they have on-board. They're very unlikely to risk working beyond their abilties, particularly when a product budget is generally in the range of several million dollars.



That much, I agree with: hiring more developers isn't the solution in a situation like this. The new hires would have to be trained on the software, which takes time and money, and there might even be relocation expenses.



Not at all; a company of any size usually has at least two projects going at any one time (one or more in concept and one in active development); it would be more accurate to say that a company with CCP's finances are taking a risk with four products.



So do I...