EVE Online is an odd duck among MMO games, catering to a very hardcore market of science fiction enthusiasts. Despite being a brand new IP, it’s managed to attract a fairly sizable audience with many zealous believers. It presents an interesting marketing challenge, something that EVE Online/CCP Public Relations officer Ned Coker was kind enough to talk about with us, and he even shared some info about CCP’s other upcoming projects.
[a]list: While most MMO titles seem readily eager to imitate World of Warcraft, EVE Online seems to thrive in its own unique culture. How do you seek to emphasize those differences with your promotions?
Ned Coker: While EVE exists as the same “game category” as World of Warcraft – massively multiplayer online game – our design is fundamentally different on many levels. Things like our extensive death penalty and single-shard server architecture (everyone plays in the same game world) really push it more into the realm of a virtual world, which is fitting with our company goal of maximizing human interaction. The “sandbox” approach to the game systems that make up EVE puts the power of the world and its history into the hands of the players, but also to a degree the burden of their game experience. People play EVE in wildly different play styles – not just mission runner or fleet commander, but diplomat and forum warrior. All are valid and some don’t even require undocking your ship.
When promoting EVE, we seek to show people that it’s almost as if EVE is a different form of entertainment altogether that makes true use of two of the most powerful game mechanics a company can put into their game-player choice and human “AI.” It’s a tough paradigm shift for many who are used to content coming directly from the developers on a silver platter (something World of Warcraft does AMAZINGLY) instead of sitting out in the wilderness for them to discover, gather and take back to their workbench and craft into their own game experience. So while we pitch EVE Online for all of its regular game components – a deep, rich sci-fi universe where you are a powerful pilot – we also try to spend equal amounts of time talking about the metagame aspects of EVE. You can see such efforts in the Butterfly Effect trailer {link no longer active}, the newer Causality {link no longer active} trailer and even in the in-game intro {link no longer active} movie. In fact, we created the first two in an effort to help give our players a shortcut to explaining EVE to their friends and families, since EVE often eludes definition and an “easy” explanation because of its depth and breadth. We also try to mirror the metagame as much as we can in banner advertisements and interviews as well, like the one you are kind enough to be giving me now!
[a]list: It’s our pleasure, really. So tell us about the importance of recruiting new players to EVE to refresh the player base.
Ned Coker: We’ve been very fortunate that EVE has grown relatively steadily since it launched in 2003. The game’s evolved to a stunning level through over a dozen free expansions. But constant expansions aren’t the key to EVE’s growing player base. Nor is the scalable game design structures and server architecture (although they help). It’s the strong player community of players who are EVE. It’s the kind of game that draws you in and keeps you there, but only because of the interactions with the people already inhabiting the universe. So, for us, keeping people playing EVE is just as important, if not more so, than actively recruiting new players. Our pilots are the aspirational targets, but also the social backdrop of any new players’ experience. They provide a rich one. Therefore we spend significant resources and effort in making sure that we, as developers, are doing the best we can to make sure we are giving them the EVE they want. They are incredible evangelists, better than we could ever hope to be. Of course there are still vast swaths of “untapped” potential players out there, from economics students to military strategy enthusiasts to players of other MMOs and even to people who jaunt over to Vegas for a weekend to feel the rush of high-stakes gambling. Each player we add could become the next Alliance leader, feared pirate or Microwarpdrive mogul, so we know that adding more players and recruiting them isn’t just about adding funds to reinvest in the development of EVE, but also about adding another bit of true, dynamic content for players currently in the game.
[a]list: Tell me about the importance that CCP attaches to reaching out to the development community in events like SIEGE.
Ned Coker: CCP views the development community as a whole as a wider social circle. Gaming, and in particular MMO development, is still very much in its infancy and that infancy sits in the wild west frontier of entertainment. Baby on a mesa! Therefore, there’s still so much that we can all learn from each other that it’s just stupid not to support the community as a whole. We attend a lot of conferences like SIEGE (and larger ones like GDC) because there’s always tricks and tips to be learned from other developers, fans, and even those still in school. We have a pretty unique take on things – approaches to game creation forged from experience – and we definitely feel an obligation to “pay it forward” to other people in hopes of inspiring them to create games in the same way that those pioneering the industry before us did for us.
Own a piece of space… literally.
[a]list: How is promoting EVE different in unique regions of the world, like North America, East Asia and Scandinavian countries
Ned Coker: I can say it’s not easy. We’ve got our super secret ways to reach them, but we still find that it’s most effective to try to help our players reach out to their friends and then a wider gaming circle. We try to go to conventions around the world, do interviews for international press and do targeted marketing campaigns as well, but in many ways the tools we need to pull it off most effectively aren’t always there – the communities too insular or obscure, the online components missing in favor of localized magazine distribution, and the retail channels not as reliable. BUT… it’s all proven to be truly worth whatever effort we can put into it. EVE has a fantastic international community and it makes for a much richer and more varied game. When the opposing Alliance actually communicates in another language, it makes it that much… cooler. We are working towards localization in many languages, even if it’s not an easy road to go down. We’re also looking to expand the payment methods themselves, which can be barrier to people who are used to paying for online purchases in drastically different ways or even simply with different currencies. Each region is a challenge, but luckily there are players who would love EVE tucked away in all parts of the world so we continue to try to reach them all.
[a]list: How important is player evangelism for the promotion of EVE Online?
Ned Coker: EVE Online can be considered a social network layered on top of a game about internet spaceships. Player evangelism has always been key for CCP, but in a more general sense we’ve seen its importance grow in the industry as a whole, which isn’t surprising with the advent of things like Facebook, Yelp, and the hundreds of other methods people use to get their friend’s (or knowledgeable strangers’) opinions of things before they purchase it. EVE is no different. Getting an introduction to EVE from a friend or trusted source helps give that extra pre-buy-in to the concept of EVE to a new player that helps them hit the ground running… er undock from the station firing. While you can obviously get into EVE as a complete blank slate, having some context for it before you get there will help. Our community team supports as many fansites as we can find, we stay in pretty good touch with bloggers and the internet radio crowd and we actively try to figure out how to make every EVE player’s megaphone/soapbox/free pamphlet as big and attractive as possible since they’re better salespeople than we are.
[a]list: How has the merger with White Wolf affected how CCP looks to promote its titles?
Ned Coker: White Wolf has been around the block for some time – since 1991– so our title promotion isn’t going to change all that much having been honed pretty well through years and years of experience to the appropriate level. The merger did afford us to try out some things we might not have been able to otherwise though, such as the ridiculously artistic and high-quality clan book series for Vampire: The Requiem and the amazing cover artistry for Requiem for Rome and Fall of the Camarilla. They, like EVE, are about the worlds and experiences the players make, and are sort of proto-MMOs in their own right, with a great bent towards the sandbox game style. Not a coincidence, this merger.
[a]list: How will Dust 514 serve as a way to cross promote EVE Online and vice versa?
Ned Coker: It’s the same universe and the same wars, which hopefully houses two seemingly different audiences that can find some common interests in destruction, betrayal, friendship and victory. We already know that many of EVE’s finest long-term tacticians are secretly addicted to the visceral experience of first-person-shooters and I think it’s safe to say that fans of the type of game DUST 514 will be will also want to branch out from the surfaces of planets and into the pods of the ships outside the atmosphere. How the marketing department captures that and tries to work with it depends greatly on the players that end up choosing to play DUST 514 and create the community that will make it a great game.
