On May 6th, EVE Online will celebrate its fifth birthday. If it were a child, it would be getting ready for its first year at school, but five years is an eternity for a virtual world and CCP Games has definitely already received an education. WarCry spoke to Public Relations and Communications Director Valerie Massey (no relation) about the game, the company behind it, how it got where it is today and she even let us in on a little scoop about this summer's expansion.
"For a game that's five years old, to get the amount of attention that we do and just be continually growing I think that's a testament to how good the game is," said Massey.
It's true that EVE Online has occupied a unique space in the MMO scene over the last half decade. Most games launch and grow for a few months, then taper off slowly over a number of years. The trend is almost identical from game to game, unless there is some catastrophic incident. With EVE Online, their growth curve is shaped not like a curve at all, but a hockey stick. They began rather flat, even had a small dip, then at about the one year mark, they turned it around and have been steadily climbing ever since.
Today they're over 230,000 subscribers - which does not include trial accounts as some games do - which is up nearly 30,000 in 2008 alone (at Fanfest in November they were just about to hit 200,000). CCP Games are unique in that they've never been shy about that number. With other games, you'd need a meeting in a dark parking garage to get a rough estimate, but it's easy to be vocal when the number keeps climbing.
That's not to say that everything has always run perfectly for CCP. The game has attracted more than its fair share of drama over the years and they have learned some tough lessons. Most notably, there was an incident last year where a developer was using his powers inappropriately in the game world, the cardinal no-no of virtual worlds, and just this last week a story circulated that their "source code" had been leaked, which raised security concerns around the web.
The source code leak, according to CCP, is a big story about a rather small event, since it is the client source in question, not the game itself. As online games where the integrity of the gameplay is paramount operate primarily on the server-side and without access to this, there is nothing a player can do to influence the game. The client powers things locally on each machine and incorporates elements like graphics, not game mechanics. As such, while no doubt CCP would prefer the source not be leaked, but it should have no adverse effect on much of anything to do with their world.
Nonetheless, each time a game comes near the smell of scandal, especially one that seems to have led as charmed of an existence as EVE, one begins to wonder if it will hurt their bottom line and hockey stick-like growth curve.
"I won't say it didn't have any impact on us - certainly as far as the dev misconduct, it was a hard lesson for us - that's one thing I've always admired about us, if we mess up, we fess up," said Massey, before adding while growth did slow, new subscribers more than offset those who left during the trouble spots and the climb continued.
To Massey, it seemed only a short time ago that she touched down in Reykjavik, Iceland for the first time at 6:30am to attend the grand launch of EVE Online. It was May 2003 and the whole company, a shell of the 300 plus behemoth it is today, had crowded into one conference room to watch the game launch on a big projection screen.
They turned the servers on and looked in on the game, read the chat and saw EVE Online born. She remembers to this day how their biggest fears were character rollbacks and server crashes, but one of the earliest lines uttered by a player in EVE Online let them know they were on the right track.
