Out of Pod Experience

Interesting. Considering what we know about the White Wolf IP, I think we can assume one of two things is happening: either CCP is so hard straped for cash they are selling off assets to stay afloat (generally a bad sign), or they are divesting themselves of non-productive assets to reinvest the cash into another part of the company, such as development cash for Eve Online or Valkyrie.

I think the more likely scenario is the latter.

Now that CCP has "several tens of millions" of Kroner to burn (10M SEK = 1.2M USD so somewhere in the range of 5-10M USD), I'm looking forward to seeing what they make with it.

Considering all the plans and work to be done on citadels (art assets don't draw themselves), I would not be surprised if it went into the production budget for Eve-O.

I do have one important question; what about Carbon? Was that not also developed for Incarna (CQ avatars), which supposedly was also to be used with WoD?

Well..... there goes my life again. I barely kicked my crusader kings 2 habit. Being the byzantine emperor and spending 40 years rampaging across the balkans to kill my wench of a devil spawn daughter who was also the antichrist (who coincidentally killed all my other children) was not your average gameplay experience.

Thank god id made byzantium an elective monarchy by that point and my careful plotting meant every noble house was a relative. I also married all my generals to my daughters whenever i had the options.

Granted it wont be like CK2 or EU4 but itll be deliciously complicated and indepth no doubt.

Bye women. You will be missed.

I said as much on reddit, but as a long time pen and paper RPG player, this is excellent news. CCP has sat on the White Wolf IP for a long, long time, and nothing of note has ever been done with it.

Paradox is an excellent place for it, what's more. I look forward to seeing how this goes.

What's good: World of Darkness (the IP) is on the dance floor again and ready for more!

What's not so good: CCP just sold the only thing they could sell for a quick injection of capital... the kind of thing you hold until dire times come and are forced to monetize them.

But surely Carbon's actually for the Ambulation expansion? Back in 2006 CCP Torphie promised that Ambulation would be released soon...Incarna was just a tech-demo / [WIP] part of it that got released to TQ a bit too early!

No?

Is this a small part of the reason why you too, play Eve and follow CCP's antics with a nearly insatiable morbid curiosity and fascination? As really, - EA, Ubisoft, and their ilk are all kinda boring compared to the CCP roller-coaster. Sure they occasionally release poorly optimized console ports.. but that's nothing compared to Eve's past trials and tribulations.

Business and household economics function slightly differently.

In business you usually don't hold onto something which doesn't make you any money or less money than you expected.

What your typical business school preaches is that a CEO has only one job and that is to maximize the ROI (return on investment) for the shareholders. If you can earn more money by sueing a competitor over copyright infringment, than that's what you do. If you make more money by selling a branch or laying off people rather than reinvesting, that's what you do. That's how NOKIA went from making tires to making cell-phones and later selling the cell-phone brand to Microsoft.

As gamers we're lucky to have independant privately owned companies, like Valve and CCP, who not only develop but also publish their own games. Unlike studios who have publishing contracts, self-publishing companies will not be pressured by contract into releasing a bugged unfinished game. Had CCP had a publishing contract for WoD, you can be sure that WoD would have been released. But I can also assure you that the game would have been made for the largest audience possible and like many other MMOs released in the last 5 years, it would have been turned into an F2P and Themepark to follow current business "wisdom".

Being financially independant is a big asset for a creative company. If you're publicly traded you don't have financial independance, every single decision is immediately valued by the market. On top of that, shareholders can sue you for decisions they didn't approve with or that they think you should have taken.

Even so, CCP did the right thing in selling Whitewolf.

It's argueably true that the WoD IP will keep its value as a brand for some more years, but not eternally. Any IP needs to be properly maintained to keep its value. Old material needs to be republished or modernized. New material has to be created. This costs money, but it's a necessary upkeep cost. I don't imagine that Half-life will have the same value as a brand in ten years, if Valve by then still hasn't published or licensed a new game in the series. In the case of WoD, CCP has sunk a lot of money but they didn't have the means to complete the game. Refocussing on EvE meant that they wouldn't use the IP themselves in the foreseeable future. So they were left with two options: either license the IP out or sell it to make back some of the investment.

The thing is we're not just talking about the WoD IP. When CCP merged with Whitewolf, the latter was an independant company with an office, employees, suppliers, customers ... So CCP was not just developping a new MMO besides managing an existent MMO, they were also running a new business that was different from the one they were used to. It's like a hotel buying a petrol station, because it is close by and they hope that customers from one business will use the other business aswell. After a while the hotel finds out that not many customers use both services, and on top of that the petrol station is less profitable than expected. Since they have longer experience with the hotel business, which is also more profitable, they decide to concentrate more on running the hotel efficiently and they sell the petrol station again. That's roughly what CCP did.

Carbon is the name CCP used for recoding the hardcoded core Eve engine so it would be easier to change and add stuff to Eve and eventually even be used for new games (such as WoD)

The 3D avatar part was of course the poster child of it but far from all that was (and still is) done.

So Carbon remains in CCP's hands.

If Paradox decides to use the IP for a computer/console game they'll either use a more suitable engine or code one of their own.