So CCP, you've used our subscription money to siphon away to create dust. A free to play shooter with a cash store that you hope will pay for itself and become a meaningful part of the EvE Universe. This is a laudable goal - creating a more complete game ecosystem. Fleet (EvE) does the flying and MI (Dust) does the dying and all that. It even sounds like fun. If it were a done right I wouldn't even begrudge you using our subscription dollars from EvE to do it - if it would eventually pay for itself. If it did eventually pay for itself EvE would get that money back, and that money would get spent improving EvE in the long run.

However you made a grave mistake in your demographics and market research and the conclusions you have drawn from it.

You went to consoles. You're trying to setup a game that is only long-term profitable via a cash store on the console platform. In the FPS Genre. Did you even read reports of how long console gamers stick to a single shooter? 3 months after you release Dust 514 you will have 90% less people playing it than on day 1.

There were only 64 million play stations shipped - let's assume an EXTREMELY GENEROUS 10% (6.4mil - note: the best selling PS3 game is Gran Turismo 5 at 7.43mil units) give Dust a try at launch. 90% attrition within three months you'll have 640k players. Sounds good right? waay more than eve, right? Wrong. Because they're not paying subscription fees. What percentage of them are going to buy things from the cash shop? How many much do you think you will bring in, per month, from Dust's cash shop.

How many years until Dust pays for itself and we EvE players see the money come back to EvE? How many subscriptions to EvE could you have gained instead had you invested that money into improving EvE and marketing it?

What are you going to do when a more likely less than 1million players even try Dust 514? What happens when your 90% attrition takes you down to 100k, what happens where a mere 10% of them spend money in the cash store EVER? Where is the Beef, CCP? What are you going to do to make Dust at least break even. When it INEVITABLY fails on the Console are you going to fast-port it to the PC and see if you can try to not completely loose your ass on it? On PC it might have a chance since PC FPS players have a longer attention span for a single game - they stick around longer if it is good. However even that might save it.

What happens to EvE and CCP if Dust fails? What happens to the subscription dollars that were diverted from iterating on EvE and were instead spent on dust? What awesome features did we miss out on because of Dust, and when will we see them?

CCP - you used your existing game to bankroll your new one. That in and of itself is not an issue, but when that game has a high chance of failcascading and said investment diverted from making our main game more awesome then you have some responsibility to the players of your main game.


Note: for comparison - Wii 96.56 million units shipped, Xbox 360 is 67.2 million units shipped

[edit]
I dropped this post then didn't get a change to respond to the thread for a while. for the record I HOPE I AM WRONG and that Dust bucks the console FPS player count trends.

[edit2]
Changed the title.. title was really more negative than i meant it to be.

Why do you care what CCP does with their money? As long as they keep the servers on for EVE and continue to update it what difference does it make? Seriously this is like buying a Bigmac and then complaining that McDonalds is working on a new burger.