Feature: 'Evolution and Risk: CCP on the Freedoms of EVE Online'

In today's main Gamasutra feature, writer Jim Rossignol has a chat with EVE Online Senior Producer Nathan Richardsson to discuss the relative success of this open-ended and sometimes ruthless PC MMOG, where player-run corporations can span into galactic empires. In this extract, Richardsson, whose niche title has just announced that it now has 70,000 active subscribers, with as many as 15,000 concurrent users, all playing in the same game universe, comments on whether he was surprised by the slow but steady growth of the title: "Yes, we're always surprised with EVE. That also makes it more fun to work on. Having such a steady growth is not something we directly expected, our churn is incredibly low and our players stay for very long times. We believe that the community and large social structures within the game are the main reasons for this. Many play MMO's to be with friends and to achieve common goals with them. The original plans were off the charts of course, it included world domination, bestowing world peace, the cure for cancer and the question to the answer 42… (A reference to Douglas Adams' answer to Life, The Universe & Everything that has a special significance to EVE, since it was the arbitrary number on which the algorithm that auto-generated the galaxy structure was based.) We quickly became more realistic as the project evolved and according to our down-to-earth version of our plans, we're above the projections." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject (no registration required, please feel free to link to the article from external websites).