Imagine if one day you saw a statement on eve-online.com which said
"EDWOOD CITY, Calif., - February 12, 2007 - Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) today announced the acquisition of Crowd Control Productions (CCP Games hf), an Icelandic-based massive multiplayer online game producer. CCP's are known for producing EVE ONLINE, an MMO set in space with recordbreaking numbers of concurrent users in the same gameworld.The acquisition will help accelerate EA's efforts in space simulation and further promoting the space MMO genre. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed."
What could us players expect to see from such overtake?
Long development cycles. If _ever_... Announcing EVE ONLINE II or EVE ONLINE X (X is the fps version, note UO X and UO II) just to be put into development for 5 years and then being binned. (See UO X, UO II and Sims Online etc) Server-clusters popping up on every continent. Lake Austin, Australia, Japan and Germany. A few years later these are empty shells played by less than a couple hundred players (See Ultima Online shards)
What about patchdays? Those will be 2-4 days long depending on how many new cool features they want to cram in. (See 3 days downtime for Battlefield 2/2142 servers) WoWification is a must. (UO in general...)
Two months after the acquisation they would announce the closure of the Icelandic office and other out-of-US offices, ship any remaining employees to USA Texas office.
Announcing that the volunteer program is to be terminated. Don't want to be sued once more by a disgruntled ex-volunteer. (See the UO volunteer program closure)
A year after when the game is on serious decline they will move most of the developer force to other games. Leaving a handful of developers for basic support. (I know this aint EA, but look at PlanetSide.. SoE are the same kind of people.)
Although there have been some hitches along the ride, such as developer misconduct. Thinking of the possibilites of EA takeover on EVE I'm glad that CCP are still at the helm and going strong. Cheers CCP! (and dont you dare plan to sell out to EA)
13 Comments
QFT
Damn right. CCP may have made mistakes and such but I know they love the game as much as I do. Just chatting to some of the Devs at the fanfest made that clear to me.
Now, back to more yaarrring...!!!
When I first read that the top line explaining the "what if" part was covered. So I thought this was real, and got rather panicked.
Concurred.
That was a scarey dream you had last night, Anders. I would stop eating cheese before bed-time if I were you
And also, I hope a meteorite doesn't hit the CCP offices. And a flood would be bad, too. Earthquakes would ruin the game. Locusts, frogs, moon as sackcloth are all bad as well.
Seriously, is this out of left field or what? What to worry about next? Flouridation of our water suppply?
Don't you ever scare me like that again!!
Man, what a nightmare you had.
Cheers to our Viking developers and their Nordic isolation!
Long live CCP.
EA! AH MY EYES BURN! altho the command and conquer series is published under thier name, and i like that. however, any big developer would most definatly screw up eve.
btw, never do that again
The only developer other than CCP that might possibly be able to do a decent job with Eve-Online is Epic Games. And that's only because they put a huge amount of care into their games. But still, CCP is pretty much the best for the job.
Scared the crap outa me :)
I agree, good to see indy's successful
and after a couple of months they would announce that they are closing down eve and moving the servers to The Sims Online 2
history shows that they propably would do that.
i hate EA.
EA Games - Repackage Everything!
Well I am not much of an expert when it comes to complex game features but I know few things about online simple games, I personally find them more attractive. So, I guess this change won't affect me too much.