Lilith Apsu
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Posted - 2011.06.22 06:41:00 -
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Edited by: Lilith Apsu on 22/06/2011 06:42:44
I note that much of the discussion is from extremely passionate and talented people devoting their time to making applications to enhance (and in some cases fix) the EVE Online Experience. The majority of these people are doing it for their love of the game, and not trying to make a buck.
I'm here to offer a slightly different perspective, in part because it strikes me as inconceivable that CCP won't relent on requiring a $90 license for folks who are investing money and time in their development with no hope of financial benefit, other than perhaps recouping some of their costs. As stated elsewhere, a $1 license would suffice to protect IP and trademarks. I want to make the harder case, for not having the fee for us money-grubbing programmers who would like to make a buck.
I'm a programmer involved in online game development, with a friend who is a huge fan of EVE, and has played it for years. While looking for a project to work on to both have fun and ideally make some profit, I asked whether EVE had an API and he showed it to me, I was extremely excited, and after a few days work, we confirmed it would be easy to make some pretty sexy tools that could assist both individuals and corporations in-game, through the IGB in ways not yet done. In addition to all the amazing tools folks have made, there's room for some extremely handy (and somewhat programatically simple) tools to be developed to make use of the IGB.
While entering EVE, I read the ad for the "Monetizing" blog post, and was delighted that the folks at CCP were forward-thinking enough to try to assist their userbase by helping them figure out how to profit from their passion. My delight turned to chagrin after reading the article. For reasons I won't bother repeating (as they're eloquently described elsewhere in this thread), the license decision seems to be an epic fail all ways around.
I love the idea of trying to make a bit of coin while making the gaming experience better for existing players of a game like EVE. I enjoy the speculative approach: build something cool, see if people want it, if so, develop it further. If it really takes off, bring more programming muscle to bear. It's not that a $90 fee is big: it's not. It's that the fee indicates a certain mindset on the part of CCP that is unattractive to someone wanting to invest the time and money to make a tool. It seems like a great way to chase off potential investment of more substantial resources on the part of your userbase, and for people who are looking for which environment they want to develop in, takes you out of the running quickly: there's plenty of online games that are fun, and have APIs, SDKs and the like which they make freely available for folks to profit from, because they understand that anything your userbase is willing to pay some else for (whether by donation or a fee) is a value added to your product at no cost to you, which should directly translate into better revenues for you, not through licensing, but through increase user attraction and retention.
The prospective of waiting until the end of summer to find out what CCP decides (as opposed to a fairly quick acknowledgement that given the sensible issues raised in this thread, it's ill conceived to charge your userbase for making your game more saleable) is enough to make me ready to move on. On to LoTRO, on to WoW, on to Second Life, on to countless other products that understand that it's smart to encourage other people to try to make money off your product - as long as it enhances your user's experience, and contributes to fun, balanced gameplay. I think a lot of companies would go a long way to try to encourage the active userbase of developers which this licensing scheme thwarts.
Finally, I'm glad to see CCP Zulu's response, a smart course-correction from the previous CCP posts dismissive of the very articulate and well reasoned advice presented by many in this thread.
Now... where were those WoW API notes...
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