Tag Archives: Pearl Abyss

CCP Says Blockchain is “Not For Tranquility” for Foreseeable Future

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While we remain intrigued by the technology, for us, NFT stands for “Not for Tranquility”. Overall the EVE IP will continue to push the boundaries of digital economies and virtual worlds – and we will continue to explore that outside of TQ.

-CCP Hellmar, dev blog

Pearl Abyss and CCP have been the focus of a minor controversy over their apparent eagerness to embrace blockchain, crypto, and things like NFTs over the past months.

I do want to make it clear that the controversy is entirely of their own making.  You cannot hype up crypto at every quarterly earnings call, introduce NFTs into the alliance tournament, and have the official EVE Online Twitter account retweeting about the CEO meeting with crypto investors about the game and then wonder why people think you’re serious about blockchain and crypto.  This was not some fantasy conspiracy theory dreamed up in the community.  It was absolutely the result of the actions and messaging of Pearl Abyss and CCP.

Hilmar in the middle of the crypto suite

CCP is always specifically mentioned or part of these events, and CCP has but one video game title out there, EVE Online, so the conclusion one jumps to isn’t exactly a huge leap.

So this morning we got a dev blog post from CCP Hellmar, the handle of CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar, who has been out there helping stir up the controversy.  It went as follows”

Blockchain and EVE Online

2022-04-11 – By CCP Hellmar

There has been a lot of speculation around blockchain technology, NFTs and cryptocurrency and what that means for the future of EVE Online, so I wanted to address it.

At CCP, our mission is to have the EVE Universe outlive us all: EVE Forever. One huge part of this is exploring new technologies and new possibilities – something EVE players know that I’m always fascinated by. This philosophy is rooted in EVE Online’s inception; when we created EVE, it was seen as too radical and ambitious, yet here we are about to celebrate EVE’s 19th anniversary.

Many of us at CCP have been following the new frontier that has been developing around blockchains and cryptocurrencies for the past years. We’ve read your feedback and we also see what you see – blockchain tech has both a lot of untapped potential and a lot of work needed before being ready for EVE-scale games.

On that note, we have no plans to add blockchain technology into EVE Online’s global server Tranquility for the foreseeable future. For the coming years development for Tranquility will focus on building exciting new opportunities on top of the robust foundation that has been laid over the past two decades.

While we remain intrigued by the technology, for us, NFT stands for “Not for Tranquility”. Overall the EVE IP will continue to push the boundaries of digital economies and virtual worlds – and we will continue to explore that outside of TQ.

Fanfest is a month out and personally, I’m very excited – It’s been 2.5 years since our last in-person meet, in London during the EVE World Tour. I look forward to seeing many of you in the flesh again and talk about EVE and our future!

CCP Hellmar

The “foreseeable future” is not “never,” but it does at least leave us safe from the scourge of crypto for now.

My prediction from last month, based on the behavior and statements from Pearl Abyss, CCP, and Hilmar in particular, about a coming of a pay to earn announcement at Fanfest seems to have been proven false.  At least it won’t be something blockchain based, if it comes to pass at all, and that makes me happy.

But we also know that statements from CCP have an expatriation date.  We learned that with skill points and how they went from a promise that all skill points in the game would come from players to the current state where skill points generated out of thin air are for sale in the web store.  They boiled the frog slowly, but it ended up cooked all the same.

So the price of a blockchain free New Eden is constant vigilance.  Hilmar didn’t write this up because he’s our pal, he wrote it up because players were getting angry about all of his flirtations with blockchain technology and that seemed to threaten the company’s bottom line.

And that is always the final determination.  If Pearl Abyss and CCP think crypto will hurt their revenue, then they will not bring it into the game, so when they start talking their crypto talk again… and they will… we need to keep letting them know how we feel about it.

Related coverage that does not simply repeat CCP’s statement:

Pearl Abyss Promises a Blockchain Economy while CCP Prepares for EVE Fanfest

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A couple of things dropped for EVE Online yesterday.

First up was the Pearl Abyss Q4 2021 earnings call.  The company recorded a bump in overall revenue, though that bump had little to do with video games.  Revenue on the gaming front was down some in Q4, which is never a good sign, that generally being a high point for many titles with people having time to play and most titles running holiday events.

This is all covered in greater detail over at The Nosy Gamer, but I do want to pick a quote from the end of his post, in reference to the “play to earn” idea that the crypto bros have been pushing so hard.  Pearl Abyss has bought into that and foresees greater profits with crypto, finishing up that thought with:

We will shortly communicate with you in different stages about what we are currently preparing for. Our company and CCP Games both have operated MMOs for a long time and we do have the knowhow to maintain and manage a sustainable economic system. So we are confident we can create a stable blockchain ecosystem.

Leaving aside skepticism about CCP’s hamfisted, war ending manipulation of the New Eden economy and the myriad of issues that rightfully hound the flawed to the bone blockchain concepts (a presentation given at Stanford on that if you’re interested in more on that), it is readily apparent to anybody paying attention that even blockchain focused companies can’t create a stable blockchain ecosystem.

Bitcoin, which doesn’t suffer from the rampant theft, rug pulls, and scams of Ethereum and its smart contract brethren, isn’t a viable financial instrument due to wild fluctuations in price and service costs and slow transaction times, unless you really need to secrecy it provides and are willing to pay the premium required.  Everything else is worse than Bitcoin when it comes to stability, so how to you build an stable in-game blockchain ecosystem on top of that?

Hint:  You don’t.

Talk about not being able to read the room.  Have they not seen how badly this has gone for Ubisoft or how even EA is backing away from the crypto idea?

Now, I’ll grant that PA hasn’t actually done much on the crytpo front, so it isn’t like I expect it to be in EVE Online next week.  But they do keep talking about it, as does Hilmar, they keep bringing up CCP when they are talking about it, there was that NFT “experiment” during the Alliance Tournament, and it isn’t like CCP has some other game besides EVE Online right now that has any value, much less an actual economy.  There is still time to walk away from this very dumb idea, so maybe cooler heads will prevail.

We shall see.

Then, as part of the run up to EVE Fanfest, CCP did a live stream to announce things the are working on between now and then, followed by a dev blog to sum up/clarify what was mumbled or misstated on the stream.  Seriously, former CCP Dev Carneros pitched them softballs from a list of obviously prepared points and the CCP team seemed quite unprepared to speak coherently to about half of what was brought up.  CCP Swifts enthusiasm can only carry you so far.  It was not their finest hour.

We’re on a road to somewhere…

The highlights were:

  • Mystery Mining Adventure

Now that they have re-created a long career climb to mining perfection again via mechanics like waste, they’re going to introduce a new player experience to put people on that path.  One career agent made redundant, only five more to go?

  • Orbital Warzone

CCP is going to make player owned customs offices (POCOs) harder to defend in order to try and spark some conflict on that front.

  • Another Graphical Update

Literally their words, copied from the dev blog, and not me being snarky.  We’re moving closer to being able to create reflecto-porn on spaceships.  Not quite there yet, but you’ll be able to see structures and explosions reflected in that shiny Amarr gold trim.

  • Together We Compress

They are trying really hard to make it seem like you need to play the Guardians Gala event in order for them to unlock compression, but they are putting it on the test server tomorrow, so that seems like an empty threat.  This version of compression is not supposed to be as bad as mindbogglingly awful first run they put on the test server back in December, but we won’t really know until it lands there.  Some details:

  • Compression becomes a more social ability. The Industrial Command Ships (Rorqual, Orca and Porpoise) are getting new modules, which will enable all nearby fleet-mates to instantly compress their own materials.
    • This remote compression will be available at long ranges – over 200 km is possible.
  • As frequently requested, Gas and Moon Ore resources will become compressible, using these new modules.
  • The Porpoise will be able to compress Gas and Asteroid Ore, and both the Orca and Rorqual will be able to compress all resources – Gas, Ice, Asteroid Ore, and Moon Ore.
  • Compression will continue to be loss-less.
  • The capacity of Jet-cans will be doubled to make it easier for high-volume miners and haulers to work together more efficiently.

We’ll see how it looks soon I guess.

  • The Glorious Battleship

Having pushed the price of even basic battleship hulls past the 300 million ISK mark with last April’s industry changes (and don’t get me started on the price of faction battleships), CCP has decided to run with that and try to make them worth the extra ISK.  To get there they plan a role bonus that will make armor plates 50% more effective, shield extenders 100% more effective, as well as making it easier to fit an MJD when you fly one.  We’ll see if this has any impact on the PvP combat meta, but I bet it makes mission running in battleships a lot easier.  The joys of balancing PvP and PvE.

  • Crab Season Approaches

They want more capital ships to undock, but won’t make them cheaper, so they are making the CRAB beacons, introduced back in October, cost less.  You need to undock a capital ship to use one, so there you go, more capitals undocking.

  • Bolstered Bulkheads

CCP is going to roll back the nerf to capital resistance modules that landed with the Surgical Strike update in April of 2020 by half.  That and the industry updates of April of 2021 made people dock up their capital ships.  Never mind carrots, we’re now just happy that CCP is hitting us with 50% less stick.

  • Rorqual Hotdrop

Rorquals are getting a conduit jump ability akin to what blackops battleships got last June, allowing them to jump a small fleet.  CCP envisions people taking a very expensive capital mining platform on “mining adventures” with this change.  I nominate this as a candidate for and “unexpected outcomes” award when players get their hands on it.

  • Blueprint Changes

CCP would like people to use dreadnoughts and are thinking about maybe changing the blueprints so they don’t cast 8 billion ISK to build and fit, but they haven’t actually committed to that.  Still, after many months of players going on about this problem, it is nice to hear CCP at least acknowledge that the issue won’t go away by insisting producers will eventually step into line with their grand economic plan.

  • Structure Changes

We have complained about Upwell structures enough that CCP feels obliged to do something.  They haven’t said what, just that it is on the list.

  • No More Quadrants

They couldn’t keep that theme going, so they’re giving up the idea.  The New Dawn age of permanent scarcity quadrant was the last one of those.  They’ll get into their new plan at Fanfest.  As the banner says, a new era approaches.

And then there was a push for Fanfest.  I am wondering how that is shaping up, as early bird tickets, which used to be limited in supply and generally disappeared quickly, were still being mentioned right up to the last day they were available.

Anyway, that is my roundup.  No doubt you can detect some cynicism on my part, though I will say that I think CCP’s two years of “all stick, no carrot” handling of the game warrants a bit of that.  Add in Pearl Abyss and Hilmar talking crypto and CCP removing that presentation about World War Bee I mentioned last week from the press site, and I feel like cynicism is still on the mark right now.

Related items:

Friday Bullet Points Vying for Medals

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The Olympics are going on right now in Tokyo.  They’re a year late and the local population isn’t happy about having a bunch of strangers show up when we’re still in a pandemic, but if I turn on live TV… which I hadn’t done since January 6th… and find the NBC channel, there they are.

I saw some sort of skateboarding event, and I was surprised to find that women’s softball made a return to the games because the US women’s team is so dominant that they removed it as an event, so I am not sure what changed there.

Anyway, I have some “not quite a full post” items again, so I figure I will make them vie for medals as well.  Who will win the coveted Friday Bullet Points gold medal?

  • Blizzard Continues to Blow Up

After last weeks lawsuit and the company’s “nothing was broken and we’ve fixed it in any case” response, names from Blizzard’s past, including Morhaime, Metzen, and Street, popped up with minor mea culpas about their failings which both stirred things up and served as a counterpoint to Fran Townsend’s statement, which drew on her nearly four months of experience with the company to reject the results of the two year investigation by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing.

While more hostile workplace workplace stories continued to pop up about the company, many current employees… the people who have to put up with much of the bad environment that senior management and HR have allowed to fester… were very unhappy with both Ms. Townsend’s and the company’s response to the lawsuit.  Word was that work at the company had pretty much ground to a halt.  Around two thousand current employees signed a petition and a walkout was staged to protest the company’s response to the lawsuit and to demand that they fix the company’s toxic culture and roll back some of their more oppressive policies.

This got Bobby Kotick to finally release a statement apologizing for the tone deaf nature of the company’s response to the lawsuit along with a promise to do better, which included hiring a law firm to make sure any accusations were taken seriously.  And then somebody pointed out that the firm they hired was the same firm that Amazon uses to break unionization movements in their ranks and it all seemed like just more of the company trying to protect itself from its employees.  Employees getting organized makes management panic.

And then even more stories showed up, this time fueled by the social media accounts of male staffers who seemed quite unashamed about their behavior.  More just keeps showing up.

At least the WoW Team started removing mentions of former Senior Creative Director Alex Afrasiabi, who the company admitted was fired last year due to his behavior.

There’s a new field marshal in town… at least in retail

Meanwhile, institutional investors are mulling over a lawsuit about all of this.  Yes, you do have a fiduciary responsibility to not run a company like a frat house until the government sues you.

Medal Status:  Disqualified for doping… as in the place is run by dopes.

  • California has Standards

I was trying to figure out why a post I wrote early last year about a state of California sponsored study in to video game related power usage was blowing up in my stats earlier this week when MMO Fallout pointed to an article over at The Register about how Dell won’t ship certain computer configurations to California.  This caused a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth and headlines about gaming PCs being banned California.  How will gamers in the golden state survive?

The reality was a bit more nuanced.  Actually, The Register article was nuanced, but a lot of the follow on seems to be more fearmongering than reality.

The restriction isn’t even on peak power consumption, but how much power a configuration consumes when it is idle.  And it has nothing to do with building your own.  You can order your parts and put them together however you like.  Dell and other builders can figure this out.

Medal Status: 80 Plus Bronze score

  • Neverwinter Embraces Bards

The Bard class is one of those MMORPG things that, when done right, can be magical.  Bards in EverQuest, for example, were incredible, and all the more so because players figured out how to push them beyond their expected limits.

Sing “heal” dammit!

So when I saw that the next Neverwinter expansion included a bard class, I was immediately interested.  I haven’t touched the game in years and I doubt that will change, but I am curious about how bards will work out.  Their promo reads:

A versatile adventurer, the bard commands the power of song to be a powerful healer or a stylish combatant. Regardless of their path, it is a bard’s ability to perform that determines how far they can go

Seems in tune, but I will wait for the reviews.  The game is also undergoing a level squish, always a daring venture.  I wonder if the effort that goes into it will be worth the reward.

Medal Status: Silver tongued

  • Guild Wars 2 End of Dragons Expansion

ArenaNet has announced the target launch date for the next Guild Wars 2 expansion.  Called End of Dragons, it should be arrive in February of 2022.

But we get to end them, right?

As with Neverwinter, I don’t really pay much mind to GW2, but an expansion is worthy of note and Bhagpuss says it will even include fishing.  Sounds interesting.

Medal Status: Golden dragon scale of hope

  • Crimson Desert Mirage

Meanwhile Pearl Abyss, known for Black Desert Online and, to a lesser extent, their ownership of CCP and EVE Online, announced this week that their next bit title, Crimson Desert, has been delayed indefinitely.

The desert is implied I think

While Peal Abyss has other titles in the pipeline, Crimson Desert has been the big focus, so its delay may impact how the company does on the market.

Medal Status: Did not finish

CCP and the Transition of Project Nova

One of the news items that popped up while I was away for the last week… the last few posts were written in advance… was about CCP and Project Nova.  I saw multiple headlines saying it has been cancelled but, as with everything around this project, it just isn’t that simple.

Project Nova, the FPS game that CCP has seen as something of a successor to the late DUST 514, has been kicking around as an idea or concept or plan for quite a while now.  We even had a blog banter topic back in May of 2016 about Project Nova, which pre-dated the actual end of DUST 514. It isn’t a new thing.

It was even said to be “closer that we think” back at Fanfest in 2018 and we were shown demos and allowed to sign up for alpha at EVE Vegas later that year.

And then about a week later it was announced that the whole thing had been postponed.  Nothing like building something up at a convention only to pull the rug out immediately afterwards.  Of course, that was just after the Pearl Abyss acquisition closed and things were going to change.

Since then there has not been a lot of news about Project Nova.  What there has been is a series of job postings for a CCP project in the UK.  Then, in the Pearl Abyss earnings call it was apparently mentioned that Project Nova had been cancelled, so the headlines were based on that.

But we got the following announcement over on Reddit to clarify the situation.

We’re continuing to develop our sci-fi multiplayer shooter game concept, actively evolving it beyond the original scope for what was formerly codenamed Project Nova. Development efforts on this concept are now the full focus of CCP’s London studio. Project Nova team members based in Iceland have been moved onto other projects at our Reykjavík studio.

This decision was taken because Project Nova’s gameplay experience as presented at EVE Vegas ’18 would not have achieved our ambitious goals for this concept. Moreover, it is very common for games in active development to evolve over time, often substantially. We remain committed to offering a rock-solid, action-oriented gameplay experience with stellar visuals, but due to significant changes in the scope and direction of our sci-fi multiplayer shooter game concept, it also made sense to update how we refer to this project internally. So, we are no longer using the codename Project Nova for this game concept.

Furthermore, we are moving away from publicly announcing our internal project codenames and will wait until we’re ready for a full reveal. We want to show you rather than tell you how we have evolved this concept and we’re looking forward to doing so when the time comes to present this concept as a fully-fledged game.

So there is still an FPS under development at CCP.  The development is now being done in the UK at CCP’s London studio.  It isn’t clear if integration with EVE Online is still a goal of the project.  And, finally, the whole thing is no longer called Project Nova, but they are not going to tell us what the new code name is for it so we’re all going to either refer to it still as Project Nova, or possibly The Project formerly known as Project Nova.  I am not sure either is exactly an improvement.

However, it is probably a good thing for them to stop telling us about things that aren’t anywhere close to done as they can’t seem to keep themselves from giving estimated ship dates that are nowhere close to reality.

Anyway, “cancelled” didn’t really seem like the right word.  They didn’t say they were throwing away all the work and starting again from scratch.  But it makes for a catchy headline.  And, as with Titan over at Blizzard, we may not end up getting something that lines up with past visions of the project, but which may still contains elements of earlier plans.  We shall see.

Related Posts:

Top Five MMORPG Stories I am still Waiting for in 2019

We are here in the final third of 2019, just four months left to go in the year and it has been a blur so far.  Everything has gone by too fast… except for those last two weeks before WoW Classic, which seemed painfully slow.

But there are still some new stories I am waiting for to pop up, things I feel certain we’ll hear about between now and the end of the year.

So I put together a list of five such news stories that I will be watching for between now and New Years Eve, and I’ll be disappointed if I don’t get them all.  These are, of course, steered by my own interests.  Your mileage may vary.

1 – Blizzard – WoW Classic Plans

Less than a week ago Blizzard let WoW Classic out into the wild and suddenly the retro sound track of life started playing Oops!… I Did It Again as the WoW team once again unleashed an uncontrollable juggernaut into the MMO scene.  2004 all over again, and Blizz will be some time getting it under control.

But with that much positive feedback on WoW Classic, including the stock price getting a bump, they cannot possibly leave things as they are.  They have to announce a plan for future retro operations.  They have hinted at various things, but the board of directors will want the ongoing stock boost that will come with an announced path forward.  It can be more fresh WoW Classic servers in a year.  It can be plans for The Burning Crusade.  It can be a tech breakthrough to eliminate queues.  But they have to announce something.  If there isn’t a whole session about this at BlizzCon 2019 I will be disappointed.

2 – Daybreak – The Breakup

Part of my New Year’s Predictions for 2019, we have been getting hints about Daybreak becoming multiple studios with Darkpaw Games and Twitter accounts for a while now.  Somebody has to be buying some or all of the place.  At some point… probably on a Friday afternoon after 3pm Pacific Time if I know Daybreak… they are going to have to spill some news on this and give us something in a press release.  Waiting for that Friday afternoon.  My vested interest here is to end up with a company that is focused on the EverQuest property that won’t be distracted by, or need to bear the burden of, fruitless attempts to make battle royale a thing again at Daybreak.

My current tinfoil hat theory is that CCP moving EVE Vegas to San Diego for 2020 along with the EverQuest team putting out a questionnaire about a possible player event in 2020 adds up to Pearl Abyss buying some, if not all, of Daybreak.  Maybe they want PlanetSide Arena as well, or maybe the don’t.  We’ll see.  The odd part about this crackpot theory of mine… other people have written more about it than I have.

3 – CCP – New Player Experience

CCP has been fretting about new player retention… again.  Despite the fact that their numbers seem to land pretty solidly within the industry norms, they want to do better.  An admirable goal, for sure, and they have declared that they are pulling resources from other projects to work on this.

The problem is… well… have you played EVE Online?  Nothing short of a complete revamp of the UI is going to make it more comprehensible.  And it is still an 16 year old MMO, a market position where a 2% new user retention rate is considered viable.  So I am waiting patiently for CCP to announce their plan to tackle this issue mostly so I can either be amazed or point and laugh.  I expect to do the latter.

4 – CCP – The Golden Parachute Escape

It was a little less than a year ago that the Pearl Abyss acquisition of CCP closed.  That included a series of performance goal to meet in order for CCP and its investors to get the full $425 million.  I expect that once the first anniversary of the acquisition hits in October we will see a quick exit by some of the vested CCP honchos, with Hilmar leading the pack.  I would buy into his statements about how he loves to interact with EVE Online players a lot more if he didn’t already have a foot out the door on his way to a new venture.

So the news I am waiting for concerns the disingenuous rats deserting the ship.  After that maybe somebody will have a better plan than chaos and pitting various player groups against each other in order to improve EVE Online.

5 – Blizzard – New Games

I had a bunch of possible items for fifth spot, all of them Blizzard related.  For example, what ever became of Diablo Immortal?  NetEase says it is done.

If nothing else, I have the core of a BlizzCon projection post already set.

But on that list, the easy first item was to hear about new games that Blizz has been hinting about.  And not an old new game.  Not Diablo IV.  But a new new game.  Blizz has found success in the past making new versions of the games the main developers have enjoyed.  This has been somewhat diluted by the growth of the company.  It is no longer a bunch of people who enjoyed raiding in EQ so they decided to make WoW, but I still want to see what they have going.

Another Studio Acquisition Story

Or a few stories really.

Acquisitions are much on my mind still and since Massively OP is still going on about the concept I’ll carry on as well.  Previously I meandered on about reasons for them and often how things can go bad.

Getting acquired can suck.

There can be a loss of prestige in not being able to make it on your own.  And, of course, there is always some loss of freedom and autonomy as you have to answer to the new owners.  Plus the company doing the buying doesn’t always know how to treat their acquisition.  Culture clash can be an issue and can lead to key developers heading for the exit.

But sometimes things do work out for the better.

For example, there was a company called Silicon & Synapse, Inc.  Founded in 1991, it did some platform ports to start off with, then moved on to a couple of original games that were published by Interplay.

A brain was their mascot, of course

The name of the company wasn’t as brilliant as the founders thought and they changed it to Chaos Studios, Inc.  However they were soon acquired by Davidson & Associates and ended up having to change their name again because somebody else held the rights to the name and they couldn’t afford to purchase them.  There was even a little story in the Technology section of the LA Times by one of the staff writers who probably drew the short end of the stick on that one.  It is short enough to quote in full. (Hopefully the LA Times won’t come after me for that.)

May 24, 1994|Times staff writer Dean Takahashi

From Chaos to Blizzard: Chaos Studios, a developer of video and computer games in Costa Mesa, has changed its name to Blizzard Entertainment.

Part of the reason is to reflect its new ownership. Davidson & Associates in Torrance, an education software company, bought Chaos Studios earlier this year in a $6.75-million stock deal.

The Costa Mesa game company, which formerly developed games for other publishers, will publish its own games as a result of an infusion of money from Davidson.

Another reason is that the rights to the Chaos name were owned by a small holding company in New York, Chaos Technologies, which also owns a video game company.

Allen Adham, president of Blizzard, said Chaos Studios couldn’t afford to pay for those rights, so the name was changed to Blizzard, which had a nice ring to it.

“We’re still the same lovable company,” he said.

We’re still the same lovable company!  That has to be one of the most low-key “before they were famous” news stories.

But look how things worked out.  Despite having been acquired just three years into their existence… and before they even had their name fully settled… Blizzard went on to be a powerhouse.  Blizzard has essentially never been a stand-alone company, not under that name.  Its success came after it was acquired.

Success grants you some power and Blizzard itself, having done well with Warcraft, was able to acquire Condor Games, renamed Blizzard North, which turned out Diablo and Diablo II.

While that turned out well initially, problems with then Blizzard owner Vivendi led key members of the Blizzard North team to leave and found Flagship Studios.  The studio was dissolved after  Hellgate: London failed to take off and some of the people from that venture ended up at Runic Games, the makers of Torchlight and Torchlight II, while key team member Bill Roper landed at Cryptic Studios.  Both Runic and Cryptic were later acquired by Perfect World Entertainment.

Some key people from Runic left PWE to form Double Damage games, and the whole dance continues on.  A few things succeed, others don’t pan out or make just enough to be of interest to another company.

And, just to bring this back to yet another small world story, Dean Takahashi, who wrote that little piece in the LA Times so long ago, is currently the lead writer for the Games Beat section of Venture Beat and was the author of three posts over there last week, one about CCP being acquired by Pearl Abyss as well as two key interviews interviews, one with Pearl Abyss CEO Robin Jung and the other with CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson.

Rambling On About Being Acquired

In chatting with people and thinking on the Pearl Abyss acquisition of CCP, I starting browsing though my own memories of acquisitions.

A new addition to the logo page

Working in Silicon Valley, being bought is pretty much a way of life.  I have been through eight acquisitions directly in my career (plus working for two VC funded startups, which is like the worst aspects of being acquired only it never stops), watched a few more from close up, and have listened to friends recount their tales.

Generally a company acquires another for one of the following reasons:

  1. Customers – You are a competitor and we essentially want to get you out of the way
  2. Entering a Market – You’re in a market we want to be in and it is cheaper to buy you than do it ourselves
  3. Tech of Expertise – Occasionally true, but unless your company has some nice patents or is doing something Google is suddenly into, mostly not
  4. Brand – It can happen, though usually a secondary item
  5. Investment – Usually in one of four flavors:
    • Buy you, fix you, sell you for more or take you public to cash out
    • Buy you, fix you, keep you for the revenue
    • Buy you, strip you to bare bones, and milk your revenue (the CA model)
    • Buy you as a way to hide money, especially Russian money
  6. Synergy – This a bullshit word that means nothing when used during an acquisition announcement

I currently work for a company that has acquired a bunch of other companies over the years for the first two reasons, but the part I work in was acquired for the third reason, and the whole company has since been bought out by an investment group that seem set on one of the first two sections of reason five.  We share a building with a group that was acquired for the second reason and who then had to absorb another group that was hired for the first reason.

My last company was acquired three times for the first reason, and none of the companies could get our customers to leave our product for theirs.  Rather than lose the maintenance revenue, they kept is alive and even now I know somebody who is still supporting it.

And I had a good friend who worked for Palm (and got me a refurbed then-current PalmPilot Professional, to put a time stamp on that), saw the founders split off and form Handspring, watched Palm acquire Handspring which ended up with Handspring running Palm, after which he got sick of the whole company and went to work for HP.  HP then acquired Palm and basically sent him back to his old job in the building he left.  He quit that and went to another company and HP got out of the phone business, selling the Palm name to somebody who was going to revive the name for Android phones, but even that seemed to drift off.

Acquisitions are pretty much a constant.  There is even a Silicon Valley business model based on the idea of getting acquired, with Google being the dream buyer.

Being bought can suck.  After the first acquisition of my last company, which had been billed a as a “merger of equals,” the new CEO got up and made sure we knew it was no such thing, that we were those ones being bought and his company was in charge.  I was pretty sure that “merger of equals” was just another form of “synergy,” I was just surprised that he felt the need to discard the pretense and start treating us like shit on day one.  But that helped me feel all the better when, in the end, not one of our customers would move to their product and, after they spun us off to be acquired again, they themselves were acquired and disappeared.

And sometimes being bough can be okay.  As it turned out the company that bought our group actually wanted to tech we had, have adopted it, and continue to use it eight years down the road.

All of which brings me around to CCP and why they got acquired.

It certainly wasn’t for the first reason.  EVE Online players can’t simply be folded into Black Desert Online, and it wasn’t for the second reason as Pearl Abyss is already in the MMO market.  I don’t think internet spaceship MMOs is big enough to be a market on its own.

There could be tech or expertise reasons to buy CCP, but I suspect not.  Any tech would have to be abstract enough to be transferable, while expertise is difficult to pass along.  Likewise, I am not sure the CCP brand brings much to the table.  EVE Online gets more mainstream media coverage than a lot of games, but I am not sure how much the public retains.

And, while both companies have said a lot of synergy-like things, that is never a good enough reason to buy a company.  It is a nice to have, something that can make things work better, but as a stated reason it is BS.

So it seems like an investment.  EVE Online is undoubtedly a minor gold mine, as any MMO that can keep a six figure population is.  If CCP were able to focus on it, tend it, and keep it going it could pay off handsomely for years to come.  I suppose they could spiff up CCP and try to resell it, but it seem more like they bought a revenue stream.

And for CCP this should be a boon.  If the last fifteen years have shown us anything, it is that CCP has spent a lot of time and money trying to create another money earning product.  As a solo company, that no doubt felt like a survival imperative.  Now, however, as part of a larger company, they can just be the EVE Online division.

What I don’t think will happen is any sudden change to how EVE Online is run.  If you go to the AMA that CCP did in their forums yesterday you can see CCP Falcon repeating over and over that no changes are planned. (I recommend that you click on his avatar and click the filter button so you only see his posts, otherwise the whole thing is overwhelming.)  I do not doubt that.  The last thing that Pearl Abyss wants after spending $425 million on a company is to kill it by radically changing how things are done.  I am sure they are well aware of the Incarna and and “greed is good” debacle.

This could very well be a renaissance of sorts for EVE Online.  You’re never going to get avatars into the game.  Falcon was specific on that, so you can let that pipe dream go.  But CCP as part of Pearl Abyss and focused on EVE Online could mean good things.

Does that mean there will never be any changes?  Of course not.  During times like this people always want assurances that go out to infinity, and that just isn’t possible.  If CCP screws up, if EVE Online sees a big drop in revenue, if another company buys Pearl Abyss, or any number of other possibilities come up, the situation may change drastically.  But unless Pearl Abyss is just dumb, they’ll remain fairly hands off.  Some redundant positions will be eliminated.  That always happens.  But for the most part I would guess we’ll see business as usual.

Only time will tell.  But if you’re in a lather about a Black Desert Online pay to win cash shop appearing in New Eden any time soon, you’re kidding yourself.

Other speculation:

CCP to be Acquired by Maker of Black Desert Online for $425 Million

Enemy on island. Issue in doubt.

-Commander Winfield Cunningham, Wake Island, December 1941

Well, we all knew things were not going well for CCP.  They had, near the end of last year, laid off a chunk of staff… again… after a new game, EVE Valkyrie, into which they had poured development time and resources failed to take off… again.

So we had to at least suspect that something was coming.  My double bonus extra credit prediction for 2018, made back on January first, was:

CCP will announce they are merging with, or being acquired by, another studio before the end of 2018.

Such was the mood of the time.  And while the year went on and we got bits of good news about games being made in partnership with other studios, with CCP’s main contribution being the EVE Online IP and art assets, I suppose nothing really changed overall.

Still, it was a surprise to see this tweet this morning.

In case that doesn’t come through due to AdBlock… or it getting deleted some day… it announces that CCP is to be acquired by Pearl Abyss, the makers of Black Desert Online.

I guess Pearly Abyss is a name we’ll be hearing a lot more now.

A new addition to the logo page

Venture Beat reports the price of the acquisition at $425 million.  That is less than the $1 billion that was being bandied about as a number by Bloomberg two years back, but still a sizable amount, and better than bankruptcy.

CCP has a press release up about the acquisition as well.  It says a lot of nothing, as such press releases must, but I’ll quote it here for posterity.

SEOUL – September 6, 2018 – Today, Black Desert Online developer Pearl Abyss announced that it will acquire CCP Games, the creators of popular spaceship MMORPG EVE Online. The deal outlines that CCP Games will continue to operate independently as a developer with studios in Reykjavik, London and Shanghai, while integrating the company’s extensive development and publishing expertise into Pearl Abyss’ operations for all current and future projects.

EVE Online is a space-based, persistent world MMO game, developed by CCP’s Reykjavik studio. The game first launched in 2003 and has since gained recognition for its scale and complexity with regards to player interactions in EVE’s single, shared game world. EVE Online is one of the most critically-acclaimed MMORPG intellectual properties (IPs) in North America and Europe, and one of the most extensive works of science fiction in the world.

Pearl Abyss CEO Robin Jung stated, “We are thrilled to have CCP Games join our team as Black Desert Online continues to branch out globally. CCP is a seasoned publisher with over 15 years of digital distribution experience and know-how. They have done an incredible job of engaging and maintaining their playerbase, which we aim to learn from and hope to integrate natively into Pearl Abyss’ general practices across all our games. I am confident CCP’s reputable IP and expertise in global publishing will help reaffirm our company’s dedication to developing and servicing the world’s best MMORPGs.”

“I have been seriously impressed with what Pearl Abyss has achieved ever since I first visited their website for Black Desert Online and subsequently became an avid player of the game,” said CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson. “Pearl Abyss is a fast-growing company with lots to offer in terms of technology, capability and vision. I believe our two companies have a lot to learn from each other. We are very excited to join forces with them and achieve great new heights for our companies, our games and – above all – our players.”

Birgir Már Ragnarsson of Novator Partners and Chairman of CCP commented, “As lead investor in CCP for over 13 years alongside General Catalyst and NEA, we’ve seen CCP go from being a few dozen people strong to employing hundreds all over the world, with an ever-increasing customer base and multiple titles. CEO Hilmar V. Pétursson and his dedicated team have built a company that Novator and its partners are proud to hand over to Pearl Abyss and we wish them the best of luck in their future ventures.”

Pearl Abyss first launched its open-world MMORPG, Black Desert Online, in Korea in 2014. The game has received critical acclaim for its advanced graphics, seamless world, large-scale castle sieges and action-based combat system. Since Pearl Abyss’ initial public offering in 2017, the company has worked to secure competitive global IPs, such as EVE Online, through strategic investments and M&A activity.

Pearl Abyss saw record-high sales in the first half of 2018, following the launch of Black Desert Mobile in Korea. The company is looking forward to another strong year in 2019 with EVE Online and the upcoming global launch of Black Desert Mobile.

Deutsche Bank is acting as financial advisor to Pearl Abyss, and Kim & Chang is providing legal counsel. The Raine Group is acting as financial advisor to CCP Games, and White & Case LLP and LOGOS are providing legal counsel.

There is a Reddit AMA scheduled for tomorrow where, I am sure, we will be told everything is fine and nothing will change and that EVE Online will stay as it is or some such.

Hat tip to Rhavas… CCP Guard addressing the CSM

We will see some of this as well I am sure.

EVE Online Forever

And maybe it will be so.

But, having been through many acquisitions over my own career, in this stage of things it is in the interest of both companies to maintain the status quo and reassure everybody that there won’t be any significant changes.  That sort of news has to wait until the acquisition is complete and things have settled down a bit.

After all, everything was all light and happiness when SOE became Daybreak.  The layoffs came later.

So we’ll hear nothing of substance while those who love EVE Online fear the future and those who hate it hope that this will mean radical change.  The truth in the end will likely be less than anybody hopes for.  Expect lots of comparisons and memes.  So many memes.

(7:14:42 AM) directorbot@goonfleet.com: all characters must have at least 420 attack skill and 330 defense skill by next tuesday. If you don’t have the time to grind isk, you can purchase boosts from the store.

~~~ This was a broadcast from kcolor to opt-all at 2018-09-06 14:14:43.856271 EVE ~~~

I guess it might be time to see what Black Desert Online sells in their cash shop.  Maybe Jin’taan will get his cat ears after all.

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