Feel the love

Interesting times, Incarna and Carbon are coming:

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=916

There has been a huge debate in Failheap challenge about the new vanity items and the payment system (Aurum). Suffice to say I think it is wise that CCP keeps the payment streams separate so they can be tracked better.  Micro transactions are the right path and the way things are moving these days. A steady revenue stream that costs little to an end user is the best way to make money once you reach a threshold number of users.

Computer games make more money than Hollywood, and its non-gamers who spend more than gamers! Farmville on face book is worth 100 million a year:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/4873553/Virtual-real-estate-selling-for-millions

In Singapore they charge 30 cents to pay by electronic transaction. In the taxi’s they do 180,000 transactions a day, or $54,000 a day, or $378,000 a week, or $19,656,000 a year!!! All for 30 cents. OK, so CCP won’t be making this, but it is a worthwhile revenue stream to open up to players and for CCP’s coffers. So from a business sense it makes sense for CCP, but players have rightly raised issues around ‘buying your way ahead’ in EVE (do they know about ISK farmers and do they buy stuff from them?).

For all the negativity spewing forth from Failheap I think it does reflect a large number of big egos and I suspect for many of those egos vanity items will sell well.... Kirith Kodachi’s post is also well worth reading and has some interesting points:

http://www.ninveah.com/2011/05/fury-it-warms-me.html

Also Seleene has reappeared, \0/ :

http://seleene4csm.blogspot.com/2011/05/csm-6-may-summit-reflections.html

Very interesting read, and seems very positive which is excellent news. Seems CSM and CCP are on the same wavelength and the CSM is fairly united (avoiding in game politics) and some great things are coming about as a result. No, it won’t happen fast, but it will happen. This is excellent news. The only down side was wouldn’t it be nice to know more rather than anything interesting is all closed shop under the NDA.... As always just wish we were better informed as this does sound very positive. Suspect, like always so far, we will find out a few days before the next patch in the dev notes. This is not such a great way to go about communicating changes, in fact it sucks. However I take a lot of soclae in the fact that it is at least going in the right direction.