EVE General Discussion

Not paying attention to the largest share of employees and infrastructure and more than half the income?

That would be a pretty stupid investor.

More like, "WTS CCP" vs "WTB everything (mostly VR) but that wierd out-of-date MMO thing."

And where genius does the article show this as venture capital looking to purchase the business?

VR at the moment is typically losing money and occasionally breaking even, usually because of things other than actually selling VR games (exclusivity deals, combo packages, et cetera). There simply aren't enough VR kits around to make a viable market, and to make it worst, it is split in mutually incompatible devices which require specific coding i.e. different versions of each game.

PC games are a better business and that feedbacks itself. Without VR content there's no drive to buy VR hardware which makes VR content a losing proposition for developers.

And what's worst, and the real crux, is that IMHO VR dried on the vine. It should have been launched in 2015, not 2016. That's the elephant in the room; Augmented Reality already haves a better foothold than VR and doesn't haves the serious backdraws of VR.

I said it some years ago and it's bound to be true: no consumer technology has ever succeeded that couldn't be shared within seconds. People buy new stuff to impress their acquitances. VR headsets just make you look like an idiot. Do they have a market? Yes. Is it a massive, smartphone-like market? No effin way. Is it a viably sized market? Maybe in 2015, but not in 2016 when AR (Augmented Reality) scored a critical hit on the smartphone market. The game giving boners to investors is Pokemon Go. Not some VR game: name one that isn't CCP's... or name a big hit VR game, I dare you.

So that leaves CCP in the position of having an old but profitable MMO earning some 60 million $ per year and a few VR trinkets and technologies which could be big if the VR market exploded, but that isn't happening this year and Xmas 2017 is as far as eternity. So either they sell now to some greater fool or that window of opportunity will shut by Q3 2017 as the First Year of Commercial VR 2.0 ends and is put on review.

I happen to be working on an augmented reality project lately. You may be right.

All things die sooner or later...there is no guarentee that eve will last forever.....

The server WILL go off some day that's for sure......

So why complain and not take a few good days left? :-)

Eve online down will not be the end of the world....maybe for some people,but as i said before...those people have quite a different and bigger problem.....

I will second that saying.

what ever EA takes over has died in a huge fiery explosion.

C&C RA 3 had high pay actors and crappy script, compared to Westwoods unknown actors with great capability and script, Tiberium wars 4 died aswell with its sucky ending

SimCity took a year and a half to be playable with its small maps and constant problems for them to make the game offline and haven't touched it since

Now I have an idea, it goes like this:

Microsoft buys CCP and makes them do VR software exclusively.

Microsoft buys CIG from Roberts to finish SC like with Freelancer.

Microsoft kills EVE Online before showing completed SC to sell more.

My tinfoil is stronk.

The EVE Grind isn't the problem. EVE still has the "you need spreadsheets to play this" plague hanging over its head.

Dove-tailing that is the fact you're a ship. Be realistic, folks, our ships are our avatars...not the dude sitting on the couch in the station.

And for someone like myself, that is just not interesting. Flying a ship? Oh hell ya, PEWPEWPEW! But being the ship. It's jarring and takes me out of the world.

I believe those are two main reasons EVE never truly caught on.

"EVE's too hard"

and

"It's just not interesting" (which I think is the I'm a ship)

Sadly, the first has changed significantly since I started. -- You know...that lovely tutorial that was like. Here's a ship. HAVE FUN! *click*, and you were left there going "dafuq do I move??"

But the shadow of it still looms over the game. This may be why CCP expanded into the FPS and Space Ship FPS. Something to get people intrigued about how these 'other' games tied into EVE; in hopes of getting them to sub to it.

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@Kiaksar2142

It sounds to me like it was a leak. And if the MS trip to Iceland is right, it's either a Dev jumping to conclusion. Or there's been whispers of it [sell offs]. Unlike other industries the mere mention of a game studio being sold off can quickly death spiral any current projects.

No sane person would invest time into a game if they didn't know if the game would be the same (or even around) in the next year to year and half.

...and it doesn't look good when your company's biggest selling point (in terms of guaranteed revenue) suddenly has people fleeing/switching to F2P mode.

NOTE: For this next bit, I wasn't paying close attention.

I don't recall Blizzard announcing or even signaling they were switching owners (Vivendi to Activision) until pretty much after the ink was dried on the deal....in fact, I think I found out like a month afterwards that it had even happened, and that was because some were saying the glory days were "behind us now that Activision owns Blizzard".

((And the lack of coverage speaks to the above; you don't want to frightened your assets away [the players].))

Agreeing with you here. The no comment on CCP's part is very telling. Especially from a company that is very vocal about how well the company is doing financially when asked if Eve is dieing by a game magazine.