@ Letrange: I thought I was following you until you wrote “by the short and curlies” – I am assuming by that you mean they have a pet pig or something and grabbed it’s tail. You will have to enlighten us as to what you are talking about by the first paragraph.

We will certainly agree that CCP was fortunate in the timing of gaining control over the IP. And when it comes to an assertion that “interesting and deep game play” will come out of the smaller independent game developers I will whole heartedly agree. My favorite game at the time is Fallen Earth.

I don’t think it’s a case of we’re going to end up with nothing but “My Pretty Pony Online”. I do thing that the problem is that we’ve got the “entertainment industry” that has American developers especially by the short and curlies. I’m seeing lots of parallels with the pop music buisness and the big name game companies. They have much more say in what the developers do and they are aiming for a mass audience. They are also not very forgiving once an artist (read IP/Studio in the game world) fails to live up to their perceived potential (drop them like a stone once they are no longer popular/profitable). Then you have the Jazz or Heavy Metal artists who none of the big houses will touch, that keep putting out quality music year after year for the independent publishers.

I continue to thing that in certain ways CCP got luckier than they realize when their publisher decided to axe the games division and CCP were able to buy back full control of EVE online. I understand that things were very dicy for them until they hit 50k users. The big difference is that now that they are in the black (so to speak) they have full control of their destiny. Now they (as a company) may make a new MMO that’s more mass apeal down the road but everything we’ve heard about keeping the vision of EVE alive and in line with what they wanted (a dark distopian future that would make the 70’s/80’s subburbs of new york look like hello kitty land).

In a sense I think that if you want interesting and deep gameplay you’re never going to get it out of any of the “big” houses from now on in. We’re going to see the same treatment of development houses that we see the big record publishers use on pop idols. Personally I’ll keep an eye out for the non-pop stuff that I prefer realizing it’s an acquired taste and not likely to be found coming from the big boxes (possible FFXIV aside since it looks fairly derived from FFXI and that is nothing if not complex)

I’ve never thought of EVE as being particularly difficult. Each game mechanic is quite simple. “Click here / click there / whatever you do don’t click that…” Consider EVE’s healer classes – the logistics cruisers. In combat the mechanic becomes “stay at range, lock ships under fire, punch F1-F5 to repair them.” It’s not intrinsically difficult. I think EVE has a breadth of mechanics, rather than deep ones.

New features have regularly been added to provide more content, more player options, more choice. And more choice is good isn’t it? Until there’s so much a player gets lost. Hence the need for some sherpas to offer guidance – hello, EVE University. The learning curve isn’t really steep – it just goes steadily on and on…

“Perhaps instead it is the idea of putting up with the drudgery of staring at mining lasers for hours on end, staring into space watching the game play itself, so that you can one day proudly announce yourself to be a “captain of Eve Online Industry””?

EVE’s captains of industry don’t mine. They acquire minerals via buy orders, and let other people do the slow work.