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RUMOR: Strategic Options Include Possible Sale of CCP - EVE Online - MMORPG.com
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
RUMOR: Strategic Options Include Possible Sale of CCP - EVE Online - MMORPG.com
EVE Online News - Bloomberg is reporting that CCP's owners are "exploring strategic options" to remain solvent including possible sale of the business to potential bidders. This is "according to people with knowledge of the matter" says the report.
Comments
Well that's never good is it?
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Got overambitious with too many properties at once. The ones that they did manage to get to market failed horribly.
If they had of just stuck with Eve they would have been fine.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's not true at all. The issue isn't with their management of resources, but their decline in subscriptions. At it's peak EVE was at around 500k subscribers and, now, it's estimated that half that or less. They attempted to diversify their portfolio with no success, you're right, but that wasn't the nail in the coffin, inevitability was.
Crazkanuk
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Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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Now... where did I see this happen before?
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They ended up having to scrap most of those projects. The ones they did finish were complete failures.
I was thinking the same thing.
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The game will lose subscribers and dies one day, that is pretty much inevitable. The most sensible thing to do with all the money you have made is to invest them into new project(s) rather than sink them back into EVE.
I loved the ship controls of the game and it's design as a whole. It lacked a good balance of content and to be frank. It always sucked to not be able to just let my guard down. Ever! I cannot state that enough. I personally never had issues with what people considered negatives. But I was always very vigilant. Only ever ganked once which was very early on. I lost a caracal and it was to my own stupidity of trusting someone. Big whoop. The communities mentality in general changed a lot from 04 to present. Seemed like with every big scam or new way to fuck someone over that made headlines. Every would-be tried to imitate it. Anyone saying that they wouldn't jump on the opportunity to profit off of someone else is full of B.S. The only consideration there is the gain threshold vs. the person in question. How much or what conditions would need to be met to screw over my buddy. Everyone has this threshold. Where the conditions might be stupidly high. But if met....
CCP proudly encouraged this sort of behavior and it just grew and grew until the community was actually able to hold CCP hostage. On their knees begging for mercy. Gold ammo being the biggest one I think. CCP had been using that game to fund their other ventures neglecting Eve. Playerbase got fed up. That article was the breaking point. CCP in short form changed course. Which in turn set the tone for large alliances to threaten CCP at times into a decision.
If a company is going to purchase CCP. How will they break the communities current mentality in Eve? change it's image? Bring in more people? Or would they buy CCP for other reasons?
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
For years they used to talk about how they were expanding their servers and updating them. It seemed that they would push the envelope a tiny bit every month or so trying to get those advertised "big" battles to work.
I think they finally got those to perform better...but i wonder at what cost? Years of higher and higher costs on equipment...i just wonder how much they really spend to have that seemingly seamless universe for their players.
I bet people would be shocked at the operating costs. But that is just a guess. Wonder what sub numbers they need to survive and make profits going forward?
I do hope they make it and keep going for years. I do not play any more and haven't for years...but can hope they continue on.
Ok, I'm not sure I'm understanding. So are you saying that their development of these other side projects directly influenced (led to the decrease of) their subscriptions?
Crazkanuk
----------------
Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
----------------
The problem was CCP went heavily into debt to finance multiple projects at the same time. One project might have been fine. However their focus was spread across multiple projects, many of which never made it to market.
I don't see any of that. I know that they have seen EVE decline year-over-year since 2012. You can also find financial statements like this for 2015 and before, but they've gone dark on their financials and have stopped releasing the data as of last year. I thought maybe you had some additional insight because, from what I knew, they had a pretty good 2015 despite declining EVE revenues. When they went dark with their financials I figured that their subs fell off a cliff.
Crazkanuk
----------------
Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
----------------
Big companies can take those hits, small ones, not as much.
1) World of Darknes - CCP threw a lot of money at this game, and it never even left pre-production much less an Alpha state according to insiders. The managers never had a coherent idea of how they wanted the game to play, and developers stated they had to keep trashing their code entirely and starting over because the new ideas would be so radically different from what they had already written.
Not to mention they bought the entire company that makes World of Darkness games instead of just licensing the IP and then hired all of these book writers to help make the game. So it had probably twice as many story artists as real, in-game asset developers.
2) DUST 514 - CCP made one of their, now classic, decisions to severely limit the playerbase for their first foray into the shooter world by making it a Playstation exclusive. I personally know a couple dozen people that play EVE who wanted to play it, but played other shooters instead because damned if they were buying a Playstation for one game.
Not only that, but they developed it for a console at the end of its lifespan. Furthermore, if you're going to strike a deal to make an exclusive title, then it had better be something so good that people actually consider buying that system when it come out. I don't plan on buying a Playstation, but The Last of Us and Horizon Zero Dawn look so damn good, that I've considered it. DUST, however, was just a mediocre game, not an exclusive barn-burner.
3) Project Legion / Project Nova - Then CCP decided to throw good money after bad and re-write DUST 514 for all platforms. This game has been in development for a couple of years now, changed names three times and has no release date whatsoever. Before it even had any information about it, it went through an internal re-write just like World of Darkness.
4) Valkyrie - In another hair-brained move to tie one of their IP's to exclusive, and possibly dead in the water, technology, CCP decided to make Valkryie a VR only title. Since VR hasn't been the smash hit Christmas shelf-clearer that many people were predicting, they're now stuck with a title that has dumped millions into development and big name voice acting, all to have a few dozen people playing it at any given time. Valkyrie will fill the roster on either team with bots if not enough people are waiting for matches. Reddit posts reveal that teams fill out with bots regularly, except for like an hour every night right at prime time.
So yet again CCP decides to scythe their massive potential playerbase off at the knees by forcing the game through VR channels. How in the holy hell did they not develop this as a standard game with VR options? Who ties their next big title to a horse that might not even make it across the desert? The business decisions at the highest levels of the company goddamn baffle the fuck out of me.
5) Which brings me to another issue. Cronyism. CCP is one of the most racially homogeneous companies you can imagine at the management levels. If you aren't Icelandic, then you don't become a manager, and in the rare case that you do make it to management as a foreigner, then you're shut out of any decisions involving the future of the company. I get the information from people that I played EVE with in 2005, who left playing the game to develop the game. They state privately that non-Icelanders are second class citizens within the company.
This is not something that I have a problem with at a base level to be honest. I'm not a flag waving diversity forcing millennial. However, when it's clear that the management isn't cutting the mustard and you can't find managers within your own country who can actually ship a goddamn successful fucking product, then you start looking for good managers no matter where they come from. I would tell them to shape the fuck up and make a winning product, or they can go back to welding ships together in the shipyards while we get real, dedicated and visionary management from outside the company.