Quinc4623
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Posted - 2011.06.16 07:10:00 -
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I'm amazed at the overwhelmingly negative reaction, but thinking about it I can see why. In the Dev blog it seems that the heads behind this made a false assumption about these 3rd party developers. They assumed that these 3rd party developers behind such mind bendingly useful things like EveMon and EFT actually wanted to make money. Where as most of the people in this forum claim that ad money and donations were merely off-setting the costs associated with running a website, which are far greater than the average web user realizes.
I believe that when it comes to a money making venture by a third party, or maybe making eve related apps to be sold in an app store, such a fee is appropriate. Though I agree that a percentage of profits might be better, though a challenge to keep track of potentially.
However for a service that is provided for free it seems ridiculous. The value these free services and softwares provide to the eve-expierience are valuable in of themselves, but more importantly they aren't costing CCP much. How much does it cost to run the API server? Is that what the $99 pays for? Unfortunately there's no way of knowing how much traffic a particular website/application/etc will cause for CCP, so there's little chance any one standardized fee will be appropriate for most. The Dev blog implies certain other services. Certainly authenticating some 3rd party requires manpower, somebody at a desk with a telephone, computer, and salary. But what does the person paying $99 get? Maybe support for monetizing their service, but again only usefull if you wanted to get paid anyway.
For people making a profit off of Eve, CCP deserves a cut, and those for profit 3rd parties could use a little support. However it seems they are a minority.
The majority seems to be freelance programmers, who might use ads and/or donations to make their project affordable. Most of these people help Eve online. Those who write bot software or defame CCP or Eve as 3rd parties, or hurt things in some way are a whole seperate catagory, and the EULA or TOS would have a special section for such acts. It's hard to imagine something costing significant money just because it pulls market data, or API data regularly. Limit an IP location to once an hour API access if you want.
Yes, you could concievably make money from donations or ads, but the likelyhood is not great. Charging $99 won't make much money for CCP, but as clearly demonstrated across TWENTY THREE PAGES it could scare away the most helpful of 3rd parties. Yeah, despite how mercantile people can be inside the game universe, it turns out that people involved with Eve on web are NOT in it for real world money. Assuming they are can be disastrous.
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