Justicar Karnellia
Ikomari-Onu Enforcement
Caldari State
157
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Posted - 2013.11.25 15:50:00 -
[1] - Quote
I think in an ideal world they could throw a huge number of devs at the project until it reached the same quality as EVE and were churning out expansions every six months for Dust 514, but from a business perspective I think that this would be untenable.
EVE online is the number one cash generator for CCP - alone the company generates over a percent of Icelandic GDP - pretty impressive for a single company. Remember though that Iceland has its own problems - notably that it is under capital controls which prevents expatriation of funds overseas, so hiring workers even in their headquarters is a problem for CCP.
Free to play MMO's are still a new business model. In CCP's business plan, they probably anticipated a loss in the first few years (most businesses are loss making the first couple of years), and there's no need to deviate from this plan unless there is exceptional growth. As you can see for yourself, the lukewarm response to the game and current player numbers are probably on par or below par for what they expected, so they don't want to throw extra manpower at the project just yet and will just stick with whatever their initial business projections were.
Losing their EP (Executive producer), for whatever reason, slowed down the development of the game somewhat as there's no "helm" of the ship and a lot of what they were doing afterwards was stop-loss.
The aforementioned visa troubles in China are notorious - I've seen first hand the difficulties it can cause. There is no shortage of local IT talent in Shanghai but keep in mind it has a large expatriate population anyway and you cannot work there without visa sponsorship (like most expatriate destinations, think Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc.)
I too am frustrated at the snail's pace and lack of clear roadmap. I'm hanging in there because it is brimming with potential, and the messages from the CPM and CCP seem to be that they are committed to making it better, which is a good sign in itself. If they suddenly started scaling back resources in the Shanghai office or slowing down the patch cycle, this would ring alarm bells, but they aren't, so I remain cautiously optimistic.
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Justicar Karnellia
Ikomari-Onu Enforcement
Caldari State
185
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Posted - 2013.12.03 10:11:00 -
[2] - Quote
China is well known for it's tortuous visa process - a member of my family had to go through it himself and it wasn't fun at all. It's not overly complicated, it's just bureacratic and time consuming.
Having said that, it seems CCP has realised this is an issue over there since they are currently looking for a HR manager:
Jobs in CCP shanghai office
I can live with these kinds of issues, I'd just wish we had a clearer roadmap - of course this is a shared frustration - you just have to read the CPM comments to understand they are wrestling with the same issues - speaking of which, I noticed their weekly statements dried up some time ago?
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