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CCP's Yohei Ishii

The EVE developer's business boss on bringing MMOs to console, microtransaction and long-tail success

GamesIndustry.biz Activision's take on any Call of Duty persistent world is likely to be more about persistent stats, unlocks and leaderboard tracking...
Yohei Ishii

Yeah, and that's fantastic, but that's just a stopgap to getting to a more immersive world like we're doing, where those items actually mean something because other know that that's rare and all that.

GamesIndustry.biz Isn't there a difference, though, between creating Dust and its community in essentially a calculated way, whereas a lot of what makes Eve happened almost by accident, by the players doing things you hadn't imagined?
Yohei Ishii

Sure, yeah. I think a lot of what happened with Eve wasn't engineered. But what we did was we saw what players were doing and then created the tools, through expansion, that created the framework of the things they wanted to do. That's really all about that sandbox emergent gameplay. With Dust, obviously it's an FPS so there are going to be more elements where we need to help guide players, but then they create their own corporations, they can accept or decline contracts from Eve players, and they can dictate what they do. But you're right, we have a lot of learning from what transpired in Eve. And that's why it's very unique for a PC MMO company to then jump to console, but the technology is there, we have the veterans who have done this, they have worked on Battlefield and all these types of games. We think we're bringing our kind of special sauce from what we've done with MMOs. Just by the sheer fact that we have an MMO, a very vibrant MMO that all those players are going to tap into from day one...

GamesIndustry.biz I wonder how many of those Eve players will pick up Dust anyway, even if they're not console players...
Yohei Ishii

Yeah, yeah. But we think that even if there are players who play both, it's probably pretty clear that the Eve players like doing what they do in Eve, and they're going to like it even more when they can send contracts out to mercenaries, to real life people, which they do in the world of Eve. And then we see the Dust mercenaries growing their own power base and expanding - because we're going to have expansions for Dust as well - so we can start getting those ties closer and closer together. It'll all kind of blend together.

GamesIndustry.biz Are you making Dust with more of an intention to control players a bit, as there have been a few times where Eve seemed to have briefly spiralled out of your control, when big corps took over a bit too much?
Yohei Ishii

No, honestly not. We obviously have to step in and monitor or administer things when there are clear violations of the EULA, but we actually advocate the kind of world where the players can dictate what happens. The gamer who created a virtual bank in Eve, he stole money with it, and end of the day there were a lot of players who were pissed off, but he didn't break any rules with Eve. He was just a good actor. And think about it from our standpoint. How painful was that for one of those players? That's a real emotion, that's not just some kind of paraded emotion because of how something looks - that's powerful. And so we want to be able to replicate, not that per se, but those real emotions, whether it's exhilaration because you just conquered this territory, you changed the tide of the war, and everybody knows about it, right. You are famous within the game, as opposed to being a number on a leaderboard. But also you can totally be a villain, and we're not going to stop you from being a villain.

GamesIndustry.biz Because it is such a massive, exciting risk and a long-term investment and prospect, are you at all prepared for failure, if the console shooter audience just doesn't take to it for whatever reason?
Yohei Ishii

We look at it differently. We don't how subscribe to how current games are created and then launched into the market. We're very much about the long tail. We're sticking with it like we stuck with Eve, so we have high hopes. I think there's more are more excitement around what we're doing with Dust, it hits so many of those right cores, and what the other guys can't do yet or are striving for - we're doing it right now. But we're not pushing for a giant Call of Duty type launch anyway. If we don't hit 6m in the first couple of months, that's fine, that's not what we're really going for. We're going for what we've seen in the CCP part of the world, and really with Eve, that it's not about that one hit, buy the game and then you're done. It's about acquiring a user and keeping them for a year, two years, three years... If you look at the lifetime value of player in that sense, it's so much more than that $60 you get from a box. I don't know if I'm answering your question, but we're not looking at it the same way. It's not a failure for us if we don't hit hundreds of thousands right off the bat. And we're going to stick with it, we're going to expand it, we're not a public company. Eve has been very good to us, it throws off a lot of cash, and we can stick with Dust too.

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Alec Meer

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A 10-year veteran of scribbling about video games, Alec primarily writes for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, but given any opportunity he will escape his keyboard and mouse ghetto to write about any and all formats.

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