'Eve Online' Studio Acquired By Korean MMO Maker (engadget.com)

MAXOMENOS writes: EVE Online developer CCP Games has been acquired by Pearl Abyss, the South Korean studio behind the action-oriented MMORPG Black Desert Online. According to VentureBeat, the deal was worth $425 million and will close in early October. It's a surprise announcement for CCP, which has long operated as an independent developer. Eve Online isn't the biggest MMORPG on the market, but it has maintained a steady and loyal userbase through continuous updates and a well-timed switch to a hybrid premium and free-to-play model. The 15-year-old game is unique, too, with its large-scale battles and notoriously complex economic and political systems.

Comments

RIP Eve

[spiritplumber]

Now watch the new owners completely misunderstand the userbase's culture and wreck a good thing.

Re:RIP Eve

[sinij]

If someone could make EVE more grindy, it would be a Korean MMO maker. I don't see them misunderstanding that aspect, as they invented Korean Grinder.

Re:RIP Eve

[duke_cheetah2003]

Now watch the new owners completely misunderstand the userbase's culture and wreck a good thing.

CCP already did that years ago.

Re:RIP Eve

[Anonymous Coward]

Son, if Koreans will do anything it's inject sexy alien women and bikini-space-armor into it.
East Asia never suffered the retardation of puritanism, which is unique to the Western world owing to Abrahamic doctrine, to develop Gymnophobia and Genophobia, so they don't care about the Church-Feminist anti-sexualization offense alliance. The only exception are the "Communist" governments there.

Re:RIP Eve

[St.Creed]

It was bad in the beta and never actually recovered from some pretty bad development choices. Have they discovered parallel processing yet? And version management? Okay, I guess the last one was a bit mean. They must have discovered Git by now.

But seriously, the game is an unstructured mess. Played it for a while, flew a Machariel and did incursions, level 4 missions etc. but after a while it got boring. May pick it up again though.

Not Good News

[Kunedog]

Shamus Young has a series on Black Desert, explaining how shockingly aggressive, expensive and game-ruining he found the microtransactions system to be, even if you're familiar with the worst of the American systems. There's manadatory PvP and deliberately cramped inventory space but the "cash shop" can always make things better (i.e. playable).

I'd be worried if I were an EVE Online fan.

https://www.shamusyoung.com/tw...

I see all the default clothes are bland and I need to pay real money for a cool outfit. Aesthetics are important to me. (Which is why I spend so much time on sculpting my character.) So I really don’t want to spend the rest of my time looking at these blando outfits. Sigh. Fine. What’s a pretend suit of armor cost these days? Three bucks? Five bucks?

FORTY SIX AMERICAN DOLLARS? ARE YOU TRYING TO START A FIGHT?

The cheap outfits can be had for $22. They also offer ladies underwear sets for just $7, if you want to run around in your underpants. (I don’t, thanks.)

(They also offer similar options for male characters. I was tempted to get the outfit that would let my kung-fu guy go shirtless, because he’s a kung-fu dude. But all of the choices looked like modern-day boxers. You can’t just wear baggy pants with no shirt.)

Would you like to dye that super-expensive outfit you just bought? Or any other outfit? That will set you back another $10. And that’s somehow a rental. Your ten bucks gets you a month of being allowed to have dyed clothes. After the month is up, your clothes revert to their original colors and you gotta fork over another $10.

Do you enjoy wheeling and dealing at the auction house in other games, but the egregious 35% tax on all your sales is making it impossible for you to have fun or turn a profit? Pay fifteen real-world dollars and the tax will go down to the normal 5%. (For one month.)

Everything is exorbitantly priced like this. It’s so outrageously expensive that I get immediately pissed off. It’s not even about the money, it’s about the sheer audacity of the seller to ask this much[2] for what should be trivial virtual goods. Even if you’re a millionaire, you’re still likely to get offended if someone tries to sell you a stick of ordinary gum for five bucks.

Re:Not Good News

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything is exorbitantly priced like this. It’s so outrageously expensive that I get immediately pissed off. It’s not even about the money, it’s about the sheer audacity of the seller to ask this much for what should be trivial virtual goods. Even if you’re a millionaire, you’re still likely to get offended if someone tries to sell you a stick of ordinary gum for five bucks.

Sometimes, I thought Stallman was being a pendant for gripes about terminology like "intellectual property".

Now I realize he was exactly right.

This guy uses the words "virtual goods", like it's something he'll actually own. Dollars to donuts, the EULA and TOS says these 'virtual goods' are nothing more than bits on their server, you don't own a single bit of it, and they do whatever they like, and fuck you we're keeping your money if you don't like it.

Seriously, this should be a legal term. If your company sells "virtual goods", you should be obligated from the time of sale until the time of the consumer's death, to keep that virtual good accessible to the customer (and the customer's friends) or refund EVERY SINGLE PENNY of the transaction, including fees. Don't like it? Then stop selling GOODS, and call by what it is: temporary limited service perks

Re:Not Good News

[Calydor]

Remember when they wanted to make players PAY for mods for Skyrim?

Re:Not Good News

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

$46 for a suit of armor?

If I ever had any interest in playing Eve*, this pricing would instantly cure me of that notion.

*Which I don't, but still...

Eve + Korean MMO + Pay To Win

[Crashmarik]

If that isn't a match made in hell I don't know what is.

Re:Eve + Korean MMO + Pay To Win

[MAXOMENOS]

....if they can only get out of beta......

Re:Eve + Korean MMO + Pay To Win

[blackomegax]

The current beta is 3 moons, 2 stations, and a shitty framework of a "game" that runs at 10fps on a GTX1060 at low settings and looks 5x worse than games like doom or E:D.

Re:Eve + Korean MMO + Pay To Win

[St.Creed]

They're not even in Alpha. They call it that, but what it actually is, is "perpetual development hell". It doesn't have a version number but if it had, it would be 666.

Re:Eve + Korean MMO + Pay To Win

[St.Creed]

Hmm yeah good point :) I guess I was a bit tired when I replied.

Why didn't microsoft acquire it?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Since its unofficial tagline is, ya know, "spreadsheet online"

Re:Why didn't microsoft acquire it?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

It's also known as "Spreadsheet Simulator".

Re:Why didn't microsoft acquire it?

[meglon]

But...it's a really pretty spreadsheet.

Only half a billion?

[beheaderaswp]

My god... that number is kinda high...

That aside... this new owner will just accentuate the problem areas of Eve that kept it from truly meeting it's potential.

As it is, it's already a griefing sandbox with little wiggle room for anything except PVP and/or massive corporate/alliance industry or fleet ops. When it could be far more balanced and appeal to a larger player base.

Pushing it further into "gang warfare" style griefing will eventually make the player base smaller.

I stopped playing in 2016. So I played for 12 years. In the old days you could strike out into deep space and have an adventure. These days you can't do that without a full armada or a covert ops frigate. Forget being an industrialist or a trader. Without military backing you can do nothing.

Eve online almost achieved greatness. The hope always was that they would expand space so it was really big... so you could get lost in it.

That's not going to happen now :(

Re:Only half a billion?

[Luckyo]

Your description of events is the exact opposite of your conclusion. It sounds like EVE has in fact achieved greatness, because the process you describe functions exactly like real world functions on macro level.

The fact that they apparently managed to recreated the world on macro level in a game through long standing player interactions in less than two decades is mind blowingly amazing.

Re:Only half a billion?

[St.Creed]

And indeed, a subject of economic studies. Pretty brilliant work in that respect. Whether it's successful as an enjoyable game is something else entirely.

Re:Only half a billion?

[Luckyo]

Not economic. Political. This is literally the core tenets of concept of sovereignty. Economy is just a part of the picture here.

Re:I wonder what will happen to White Wolf

[ctilsie242]

Makes me wonder too. I wonder if White Wolf would be sold off (likely) or spun off (unlikely, but would be nicer). My fear is that it gets tossed to some big company, and the IP completely shelved, never to see the light of day again, similar to how EA has done with a lot of Origin IP.

Eve Online New addon will contain loot boxes

[Cito]

No more expansion packs but eve online will offer season passes at 4 different tier prices; standard, deluxe edition, legacy and ultimate edition.

Re:What userbase?

[jeff4747]

It's almost like you don't know there's already Korean and Chinese alliances in Eve.......and they're not doing all that well. I'm sure FRT will stop feeding Keepstars soon.

Re:I wonder what will happen to White Wolf

[jeff4747]

CCP was making a World of Darkness MMO, but canceled the project a few years ago. I think they sold the IP.

Also known as

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"Eve Online", also affectionately known as "Spreadsheet Simulator".

made me laugh

[meglon]

Eve Online isn't the biggest MMORPG on the market

In other news: water is wet, and the sky is blue.