Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook graciously flew into Washington DC to visit a retirement home for ageing white men and explain to the residents how the interwebs works. This was nice of Mark and he did a good job; those he couldn’t convince that Facebook is on the same level of social responsibility as Mother Theresa or the Dalai Lama he will just have to buy later. No, all booster-seat and water-sipping memes aside, his lecture was a total success and he must have left satisfied that his usual routine of apologies and vague promises of “transparency” will stall regulation of his empire industry for at least one more election cycle. As his only concession, it is assumed that Facebook will offer some form of premium service where the consumer pays directly in exchange for data privacy. For the company, this would be a great boon since they would receive this direct revenue in addition to revenue generated by selling the data on. If found out, they would just send their CEO to DC again to apologize / bribe; a pretty good return of investment.
But we are here not to talk about Facebook but EVE Online, the only surviving Multiplayer Game where interactions between players actually matter. EVE is made by the Icelandic firm “CCP” which has successfully built a company without any marketing whatsoever relying on their tribal customers to acquire more and more accounts. CCP has used the revenue to launch incredibly successful games like FPS, VR games and Vampire MMOs but fundamentally relies on generating revenue from its EVE players to sustain its business. Unfortunately however, there are fewer and fewer players, even when we purchase more and more accounts. The likely end-game for EVE are 4 US-players with questionable personal hygiene using their 30k accounts each to battle a Sino/Russian bot alliance flying weaponized Rorquals. As long as CCP gets paid for accounts and not players, this is financially reasonable but as a social medial platform not satisfying. Reddit’s /r/eve might dry out and of course that is where EVE is really played. Continue reading →