Around 100 staff were laid off in the restructuring, roughly 30 of whom worked in CCP’s headquarters in Reykjavik, Iceland. Though we were informed at the time that these changes would not impact the development of EVE Online, it since became apparent that more than a few non-development staff were cut. In addition to the EVE PR staff and others that were stationed in Atlanta, all but two members of the EVE community team in Reykjavik have also been let go. There are reports that several GMs and the localisation manager for EVE have departed too, and the mood on twitter from staff in Reykjavik recently is best described as sombre and a little shaken.
In this extra edition of EVE Evolved, I dig into CCP Games’s history of taking risks with staff’s jobs, look at some of those affected by the layoffs, and ask whether there is more fallout to come.
The early history of CCP Games
In the early years of the MMO boom, when dozens of studios were desperately trying to beat World of Warcraft at its own game, EVE Online seemed untouchable in its sci-fi sandbox niche. From 2004 when I started playing to mid 2011, EVE experienced consistent playerbase growth and smashed through peak concurrent player records year-on-year, unmoved by the release of new titles. CCP Games merged with White Wolf in 2006 to acquire an Atlanta studio that began developing a World of Darkness MMO and opened an office in Shanghai that would develop the console first-person shooter DUST 514.
From its humble beginnings in an Icelandic studio with a small family of ambitious staff, CCP Games rapidly grew into a global company with hundreds of employees worldwide. That growth came on the back of the solid revenue stream from steadily rising EVE Online subscriptions, and CCP gained a reputation for stability in an ever-more chaotic industry. This stability unfortunately faltered around 2009 as the global trend for MMO subscriptions flatlined and free-to-play business models with microtransaction-supported games began to gain wider acceptance with western gamers.
The invisible cost of layoffs
With EVE subscription growth stagnating and three major projects in development (EVE Online, DUST 514 and World of Darkness), CCP’s financial resources were stretched paper thin from 2009 to 2011. When the company’s microtransaction plans were derailed and a percentage of EVE players unexpectedly quit following the 2011 “Monoclegate” scandal, CCP was left with a hole in its books and had to lay off 20% of its staff worldwide to close it. It became evident that CCP didn’t have a financial buffer to protect its staff when forced to make cuts and hadn’t planned for this kind of worst-case scenario.
We heard through someone with inside knowledge at the time that this round of layoffs caught a lot of staff off-guard, as people considered their jobs to be secure. Many had reportedly never felt the need to keep their resumes up to date or look outside the company for new opportunities, and the invisible cost of that round of layoffs was to shake staff out of that complacency. This may have played a role in some of EVE‘s top talent leaving the company in the years that followed, the most well-known example being CCP Soundwave, CCP Zulu, CCP Navigator, CCP Dolan, CCP Bro, and mad scientist CCP Veritas all joining Riot Games within the space of 6 months.
Gambling with people’s livelihoods
In many ways, CCP’s story has been of a small company growing up and learning some harsh lessons about business. CCP learned the hard way that not even the unshakable monolith that is EVE Online is safe from changing market trends, and that every new project is a gamble. I wrote in wake of the Monoclegate layoffs that I hoped CCP would never again bet the livelihoods of hundreds of staff on that gamble, and perhaps that was naive of me. Since then we’ve seen a major round of layoffs following the cancellation of DUST 514 and World of Darkness, and now another major round following CCP pulling out of VR.
Game development projects fail or are cancelled frequently in this industry, and it’s not surprising that staff working on them are often let go as a result. CCP’s making the strategic decision to pull out of VR development and getting rid of the Sparc and Valkyrie teams is just a business decision, and it’s not an unusual one. What makes this latest round of layoffs so difficult to swallow is that it involves people who had nothing to do with the projects being canned and who seemed (from the outside at least) to be in essential roles. The damning thing isn’t that CCP’s gamble on VR didn’t pay off but that it appears the company once again bet the livelihoods of its existing people on a new project and didn’t plan for failure.
EVE Vegas and the timing of the layoffs
The timing of the layoffs has left a bitter taste in the mouths of both the community and those developers affected. There was not even a hint of a shift away from VR or company restructuring at the annual EVE Vegas event was just a few weeks ago, where the Sparc and Valkyrie developers proudly talked about the future of their games. The lead developer on Valkyrie even said to me that “if it weren’t making money, then [CCP] wouldn’t still be developing it,” words spoken in a hopeful tone that proved to be dismally prophetic. If anyone at EVE Vegas knew that this round of layoffs was coming ahead of time, it certainly didn’t show.
The timing also seems a little odd, given that CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson attended EVE Vegas for the first time this year but caught a flight home soon after his opening speech. This has led me to speculate that Hilmar may have been called away to a meeting with investors and that someone (possibly the big VR investor) may have unexpectedly pulled out. CCP secured $30 million in investment in 2015 specifically to develop VR games but had only barely broken even on that investment as of March 2017, which certainly isn’t an attractive outlook for an investor who wants a good return. This is all idle speculation however, and ultimately we may never know why the decision was made to withdraw from VR or why certain unrelated staff were eliminated in the process.
EVE Online doesn’t emerge unscathed
If I were making a list of people who are integral to the way EVE runs today, some of them would be on the list of staff who were cut. Ned Coker (CCP Manifest) from the Atlanta office was a veteran PR rep with over 10 years at CCP, and community team member Nataliia Dmytriievska (CCP Leeloo) seemed to be the vital link to EVE‘s impenetrable Russian community. CCP Shadowcat and CCP Phantom reportedly helped localise the game into French and German, and CCP Logibro was instrumental in the running of the CSM and the Alliance Tournament. Trimming the fat when in financial difficulties is expected, but these particular layoffs feel more like gouging muscle.
Last week Nataliia Dmytriievska posted a lengthy response on social media (now gone) after finding out she was being cut. It detailed how she left her family and life in the Ukraine behind and took a large pay cut to move to a frozen rock in the Arctic circle because EVE Online was her dream. She even expected to be let go one day but thought that her co-workers in the community team would be able to carry on, noting that even after the team was slashed to a skeleton crew in 2014 they persevered. Nataliia warned that “it is absolutely impossible to do anything with just two people” and worries that “throwing out the whole EVE Community Team might be the single biggest mistake this company has ever made.”
The buck stops with Hilmar
Ultimately it’s CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson who bears responsibility for any missteps the company makes. Former developer CCP Zinfandel even recently claimed that the Incarna pricing disaster was a direct result of Hilmar’s interference. Pétursson allegedly told Zinfandel that he “has no balls” and then multiplied all his prices by a factor of ten just before the expansion’s release. It was then CCP Zinfandel and CCP Zulu who bore a significant amount of the backlash from that decision. Certainly it looked to me as if the prices were off by a factor of ten, and anyone with experience of pricing strategies in other MMOs would have said the same.
If this claim is accurate, then Pétursson appeared to have disabused himself of that arrogance by EVE Fanfest 2012, at which he admitted that CCP had been “too liberal” about risking the current business and seemed humbled by the whole experience. CCP did start to get more ambitious again and take big risks when it ploughed $30 million into the largely untested VR market, but we had cause for optimism here as it was investor money and we didn’t expect failure to negatively impact on EVE Online. Recent actions have given me cause for concern that Pétursson has once again stretched CCP’s financials too thin and not planned for failure, in the process gambling with the livelihoods of employees.
CCP Games has had two record revenue years in 2015 and 2016 thanks to developing new games such as Valkyrie and Gunjack, adding new microtransactions such as skill injectors to EVE, and other sources such as the sale of World of Darkness. This has put CCP in a very good position on paper, but the studio still doesn’t seem to keep a large enough financial buffer to fall back on if a worst-case scenario occurs. We don’t know for sure what triggered the recent VR withdrawal and restructuring, but it feels like it came out of nowhere and EVE Online has not emerged unscathed.
All but two of the community team were reportedly let go (just CCP Guard and CCP Falcon remain), and there are now huge question marks hanging over official events such as next year’s EVE Fanfest. CCP Falcon even recently announced ambitious plans to run additional official fanfest events around the world in 2019, but many of those who helped run events are no longer with the company. It remains to be seen whether there will be any additional fallout from the layoffs and whether Nataliia Dmytriievska’s words of warning about cutting the community team will prove to be prophetic. We can only hope that they are not.
EVE Online expert Brendan ‘Nyphur’ Drain has been playing EVE for over a decade and writing the regular EVE Evolved column since 2008. The column covers everything from in-depth EVE guides and news breakdowns to game design discussions and opinion pieces. If there’s a topic you’d love to see covered, drop him a comment or send mail to brendan@massivelyop.com!
“CCP Falcon even recently announced ambitious plans to run additional official fanfest events around the world in 2019, but many of those who helped run events are no longer with the company”
CCP Falcon is retarded. He proves it everyday of the forums and each time at the fanfests. He thinks that he’s somekind of a PR guru or a wizard digital marketer, but the guy has zero marketing background and little knowledge about anything related.
Aside from this he takes sides in conflicts between players. LOL How idiotic is that?
Very good article; good read.
They fired the entire PR team, and yet the walking PR disaster named CCP Falcon remains…
/slowclap
Brendan, what ever happen to CCP’s talks with Microsoft?
I don’t recall hearing about CCP having any serious talks with Microsoft recently, which talks are you referring to?
My bad on my facts- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-09/eve-online-owners-said-to-weigh-game-maker-sale-after-approaches
Sorry about that
Cheers for the follow up on this! CCP has weighed up options like this as a company a few times now, including the option to release shares and float the company publicly. It has been very interesting to watch this studio grow up over the years.
“unshakable monolith that is EVE Online”
Bahaha. I needed a good laugh. Niche games are not “unshakable monoliths”.
On a side note, on the other site before it shut down, when CCP bought white wolf (merge, lol), I said it was their most brainless idea to date. Seems I was correct.
Tch. I lost all faith in CCP’s business decision after they cancelled World of Darkness. Sure urban fantasy is a niche genre but it’s also one with very little competition. Like what other urban fantasy MMO is out there other than Secret World? And even then Secret World is fairly lacking in the urban. Them putting all this risk on VR in hopes it might be the next big thing which it’s turning out it’s not.
Urban fantasy and magical realism aren’t even really niche anymore either. Harry Potter, Twilight, and now dozens upon dozens of movies and television shows have blown those genre doors wide open. Had they actually developed the World of Darkness IP into something, CCP could have been sitting right in the middle of that now popular revenue stream.
I would love a game around Dresden Files as well.
$30 Million + Interest paid back. Check. Budget versa Actuals :( Opps. Quick Head Count reduction to balance the books.
This is exactly what I think happened, though we won’t find out for sure until the company financials for this year are eventually released.
Business is about taking risks. When you win, you can win big. When you lose, well, you lose everything you put into it. That’s how it goes. You want a cozy job, work for a big corporation or the government, not a start up or small – midsize business.
Just taking a risk is called gambling. Business is not gambling. Business is about calculating risk, not just taking it. Big difference.
Perhaps the business model of profit is the problem?
You obviously have no idea how to gamble. Professional gamblers are highly calculating, know the odds, and how to walk away when they are ahead. Business is much the same. The main difference is that in business, the odds are often unknown, and yet are very much subject to the choices made.
That CCP is not much good at execution is at the heart of their failure to expand their business line. They took calculated risks, and executed poorly, squandering resources when they should have conserved them, and failed to leverage their existing advantages.
It is not that CCP took wild and random risks, nor that their calculations were wrong, so much as they simply failed to get anything done.
That pointless insult aside, I find myself largely agreeing with this assessment. Many of the risks CCP has taken over the years seemed very reasonable at the time and could very well have worked out if the execution were better. DUST 514 was a bold risk that could have worked out well based on the levels of pre-launch interest, but the game totally failed on execution. Valkyrie also somehow managed to cost $30 million to develop and the end result wasn’t worth it.
On the other hand, some of CCP’s poor execution can be linked to strategic decisions that even at the time might have been considered poorly chosen risks, such as making DUST 514 PS3 only. Valkyrie’s scope may also have been poorly chosen as the niche VR market is probably not the place for a $30m budget game. Gunjack 1 and 2 were low-risk and excellently executed but very small projects, and Sparc we’re still not sure about.
Investing in a PC FPS with Project Nova is a current calculated risk, we don’t know how much has been invested in that project financially yet so it’s hard to judge the level of risk but it could very well succeed — It all depends on execution. The mobile game Aurora is another calculated risk, and a very low one for CCP given that they’re working with an outside company to develop it, and again its success will depend on execution.
To be honest, I felt insulted. It gets ridiculous when trying to get one’s point across in text, only to have a random reply completely miss the point, and proceed to imply that one is ignorant of a large, complex topic.
I just wanted to make the point that business has risks, and that some jobs are much less risky than others. I really did not want to get into a lengthy discourse on the nature, technique, and means of risk management.
Sorry about being snippy, I do lose my patience from time to time.
And thank you for responding to the substance of my reply concerning the importance of execution.
I think the point he was trying to make is that not all risks are created equal, and not calculating risks effectively is no better than playing the lottery with your company. Many of the gambles CCP has made over the years didn’t pay off, but some appeared to be blatantly poor choices even at the time.
Taking a risk isn’t gambling, but gambling is a form of taking a risk.
Business isn’t gambling, but it *is* about taking risks.
There’s a difference in business between risks and uncertainties. Risks are unmanageable and require a measured gamble, while uncertainties can be reduced with research. The Incarna pricing wasn’t risky, for example, because any research would show that microtransactions should be on the order of $2-5, not $20-50. That was a gamble CCP didn’t need to take and that had a very low chance of paying off.
A company also chooses its risks and how much it wants to gamble, and that is totally on Hilmar in this case. He had a 30 million investment to play with in VR without risking any of the existing company, and he decided to bet more than that. He allowed the company to get into a financial situation where it would have to fire non-VR staff on EVE (which is financially excelling) if the VR push failed. He bet part of the company again and lost, and it’s beginning to form a pattern.
Now that eve’s age is finally catching upto it. (Not to mention CCP’s attempt to monetize it more and more.) I wonder if CCP will even survive in several years when Eve is no longer financially stable with the sharp decline in players year by year. (If it stays steady in it’s decline, mathematically eve will be losing money in just over 3 years time.)
It wont take 3 years, they have been bleeding out for several years now. That’s why they have been selling off and firing.
It will only get worse.
First, it’s never good when anyone loses their job and I wish the best to those who did.
Second, if you’re going to take risks you need to do something interesting. EVE was risky in an era of fantasy MMOs but it pulled it off and did something unique to this day. Both Dust514 as a console exclusive and CCP’s various VR offerings were just not very interesting products in their fields.
Console shooters are dime a dozen and often times abandoned the second a new one comes out. While I get the console exclusivity payment probably is what enabled it to be developed in the first place, just adding another console shooter isn’t enough. They had a huge opportunity to talk up and make that game interconnect with EVE and it just fell flat.
VR market is extremely experimental currently despite what one company claims. The results of Oculus initially skipping motion controls was bad not only for the company but for those game developers who created games with that experience in mind. Enter CCP trying to cater it’s games to the lowest common denominator (headset, no motion controls) for Valkryie. All the memes about 3DTVs are accurate when a “VR” game amounts to little more than strapping a screen to your face. Sprinkle on again taking exclusivity money (at the height of the VR community’s outrage over the topic) while and the sticker shock of a $60 price tag with innumerable micotransactions and you got yourself a nice ol recipe for disaster. They probably assumed being able to sell the game on 3 platforms would be okay but forgot that whole “have something interesting” part that most VR owners purchased VR for.
And that’s all it is. They just aren’t developing anything interesting.
I would argue that DUST 514 was highly interesting but failed completely on execution. DUST articles often pulled crazy traffic back before the game released, and an insane number of people created characters in the beta period before launch. When people actually got down to play it though, it was an ugly, sub-standard shooter with obvious microtransaction cash grabs.
DUST had no compelling persistent gameplay of its own at launch, and the link with EVE was so weak that it was frankly pointless. It’s hard to tell if DUST would have done better on PC, it certainly looked a lot better when it was shown off at Fanfest than when it was squeezed into the PS3. Ultimately I think it just wasn’t a very good game.
Valkyrie met something of the same fate, it’s pretty immersive and a great experience on VR but take away the headset and the gameplay just doesn’t feel like anything special. It’s not what you’d expect for a $60 price tag or a $30 million development budget, VR just doesn’t seem big enough to support that and I’m honestly surprised that it broke even.
DUST might have done better if it were developed in-house in Reykjavik, not halfway round the world by noobie devs in China. Then again, CCP has failed at everything other than basic EVE.
Not sure how much better they could have made it. Outside of its nice visuals and its EVE style loadout system, it was a bog-standard FPS. Anyone could have made it. The only thing they could have done that’s mechanically different was, maybe, make the planets open world or add player crafting.
Also make it playable on PC, but yea, I feel that has to do more with business contracts and a payout from Sony than devs.