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CCP Games, the company behind EVE Online has announced that it suffered a $21 million loss during its 2013 fiscal year. CCP also recently had to cancel its upcoming MMO: World of Darkness, which was based on the role playing board game series.
The loss was quite a big hit as in 2012 the company made a profit of $4.6 million, the difference this year however, is likely due to the increased cost that went in to developing World of Darkness. The now cancelled MMO also took up an unspecified chunk of the company's $56.5 million research and development budget. In comparison, the R&D budget for CCP was just $16.5 million in 2012 so World of Darkness definitely increased costs at the company.
World of Darkness was going to be a vampire themed MMORPG, the game's cancellation led to 56 people losing their jobs and the rest of the employees being reassigned to EVE Online. As you can see, creating games can be an expensive and risky business and cancelling a project can cost developers and publishers a lot of money. Recently, one of the developers behind next gen shooter: The Division, applauded Ubisoft for taking the financial hit when delaying Watch Dogs in order to release a better game.
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KitGuru Says: Game development is expensive, it must be a shame to see all of that money, work and effort all put to waste with the game's cancellation. Hopefully CCP Games can recover from the loss and bounce back. Do any of you guys play EVE Online? Were any of you looking forward to World of Darkness?
Source: IGN
It was the one MMO in development that i seriously looking forward too
As a 9 year EvE vet, I only applaud CCP and the way they have built their game based on the player feedback compared to some of the bigger more generic titles and was looking forward to this release
my only hope is that consider selling the whitewolf title to a smaller developer to continue or re-start the project from scratch
I think its unfair to link the massive increase in R&D budget on WoD. I would imagine a massive chunk of that went on the dev work required for the PS3 title Dust 514.
An additional thought would be that although their net profit is down by approx $25million they did increase expenditure on research by $35million dollars.
Pity. I was looking forward to this but respect to ccp for pulling the plug before it did any more financial damage
It is disingenuous to lay a loss of $21m on the doorstep of one of CCP’s projects that had a team of 56 people. CCP has been trying to build Dust514, Valkyrie, and WoD all at the same time. This is the result of having one money making project and three that don’t have net positive income (yet). They were trying to do too much at the same time. Dust is already released, so it made sense to continue working on that. Valkyrie is near release and a decidedly smaller undertaking than launching an MMO, so it made sense to keep working on that. CCP is spread too thin and had to axe WoD. This doesn’t guarantee a return to profitability, but it should bring them back to profitability sooner.
At the risk of stating the obvious – I have to wonder how much of that lost money was spent by players preparing to jump ship as it were (pardon the pun) and spending their money on Star Citizen instead. I’m one of them… I’ve gone from 6 accounts (a full 18 characters) to 1, with just 3. Sold or given away almost all my assets. I don’t believe for a second that I’m the only one…
Nor is SC the only game, the new Elite is another obvious contender for that kind of crowd.