CCP's Yohei Ishii

Yeah... Well, again, we're going to have annual expansions, so every year we're going to have a box refresh. It's not just putting out an annual expansion pack - the expansions are free anyway, we're not going to sell those. Just like Eve.

Oh yeah, we're going to have microtransactions. We need money! But for the expansions themselves, they're free, so every year we're going to put out a new box, whether it's physical or digital, and attract new users with the new features and etcetera etcetera. And they're not incremental features we're going to be adding, it's like in Eve where there's a lot more. You have planetary interaction, you go from just being a spaceship to plotting pins into a planet and extracting resources and things like that. That's the level of scope we're going for with this expansion. Come five years from now, who knows? I've seen the roadmap, it's insane what we're trying to accomplish.

Again, that's games as a service, that's what we want. We don't look at it as a packaged good, because the economics are different, expectations are different, and it's worked in the past. I think we've seen that it's changing. Times are changing.

Both console manufacturers have been very open to the things that we're looking for. They all know that games can be even more connected than where they are today. It's not just about downloading the game and then you're done. And you can't really download a premium triple-A game, there are a few maybes and they're not even current games. They see that number one they need to get there, number two they need to get MMOs and not just MMOs like Eve or Ultima or World of Warcraft, not just hack and slash types of hardcore MMOs, but other types of genre that could really fit in, that are already established. And then all the other stuff from that, whether it's microtransactions, everyone is looking at that. They've seen such success with downloadable content, it's only one step further to take it to microtransactions. Sure, there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done, but it's in the direction that everyone is on the path for. No-one's fighting it anymore; it's not like a few years back when it was "oh, free to play games, who would buy a dollar item?"

Yeah, yeah. So we think we're pretty pioneering, this is a big budget game we're doing. We started three years ago, right - before it was popular to say you were doing microtransactions.

We've been really fortunate within Eve that, even though it's subscription based, we've introduced this virtual currency called Plex, the Pilot Extension License. You basically buy Plex, I think it's worth two months of game time, you pay $30 or something like that and then you can go into the open market within Eve and then exchange that for two months of game time. Or you might sell the Plex to someone who might not have a lot of money, but has accrued a lot of virtual currency within the game. So then you have the people with lots of virtual currency and lots of time, and the people with lots of real money but no time [to earn virtual currency], and you can have this transfer of real money for virtual currency. And we've already had that for the last two years, I think, and we are monitoring, because we have our own economist within the company, tracking how people are using that virtual currency and what type of items they're buying, those kinds of things. Those items are traded by the users rather than us, but there's a lot of learning from that which we're picking up on. But any successful microtransaction-based game there's always bound to be learning. There's not only going to be the beta, but we're also going to be doing it on an ongoing basis. Listening to Michael from MindCandy, there's some really good points of you can't make free items into paid for items all of a sudden, things like that. Our designers have worked on those types of games before too, but it's an ongoing kind of learning process, we're doing something that's brand new and we don't expect to hit it 100% every time. But we will learn from it.

I can't really speak to that. I've had a lot of conversations with our economist, he's been very dedicated in terms of how the Dust economy going to connect with the Eve economy. But it's just like the real-world economy you know, can't really talk about things before enacting policies or not enacting policies or things like that, because there are really hardcore traders who will use that knowledge to do whatever. Also we're still scoping out how much of connection there's going to be. It definitely is going to be interesting. No doubt about it.

We opened up the studio because, as we were rapidly growing the company, we saw we needed to hire more engineers for Dust, but also for Eve projects. As luck would have it, the Midway Newcastle studio was let go, and we dashed in here because we knew they were great Unreal engineers. They were really the core Unreal team that was rewriting the code for all the studios within Midway. So even though some of the titles that were launched, maybe they didn't do as great as hoped, but the technology behind them was actually really strong. So we came in here and grabbed up the top engineers and programmers, and that laid the foundation for the studio now.

Yeah I just read about. That's really unfortunate. We set up shop before all that stuff, so we're definitely staying here.