Eurogamer Interviews CCP's Hilmar Pétursson
Meanwhile, in Iceland...
Earlier this week, CCP announced an estimated 20% reduction in its global workforce in the wake of continued controversy surrounding its development ambitions. The company has offered little official comment since the controversy began earlier this year, and so what follows is a lengthy interview with Hilmar Pétursson, CEO of CCP, conducted yesterday evening.
But it was also a sincere and candid one that for the first time provides extraordinary insight into the developing crisis at the company, as well as CCP's plans for the future of Eve Online, Dust 514 and World of Darkness.
I feel very accountable for the situation and it's really hard to go through these steps in this way. We took on too many things as a company and our focus was spread too thin. These were very much the decisions that I as CEO made and supported, and I think everyone now agrees that we need to do these adjustments. That's a hard thing to realise, especially because people are hurt in the process. That's the reality.
A lot of great people are leaving the company through this process, famous or otherwise. The people who are recognised members of the community get more of a spotlight but there are a lot of people leaving CCP at this juncture. How it relates to the community - that is part of the restructuring, our community division has been spread around the globe and has had a lot of good contact with the community. But we've not been as effective. By centralising customer support and community, we have more people doing community work than we did before. Being co-located with the developers allows the information within the community groups to have a much more direct effect on the development process.
The structural situation made it very hard for the development side to hear the feedback from the players via the community teams and revamp plans based on it. It wasn't that the teams elsewhere were negligent or were "bad" community advocates. In fact, they consistently went above and beyond the call of duty in that regard, were experts at remote communication, and performed very well in such difficult circumstances. There's now an even quicker feedback loop between the playerbase and the development team. That's crucial for a game like Eve where the players make the content and it's important for the "playerbase experts" to have that unfettered access.
A lot of the mistakes we made over the summer were known quite well within our community groups, but they were not getting through to the people making the decisions due to not being co-located with them.
World of Darkness is now a smaller team. As we now really need to focus on Eve and Dust, we have a smaller team than before and it's less coupled into our development process. We were running a very integrated plan which led to a lot of energy being spent on coordination, which drew energy out of actual proper value being generated. We're hoping that by focusing the company more, we have a better chance to make progress - especially on Dust and Eve.
It's definitely not a priority for CCP right now. We're really focused on making kick-ass Eve expansions in the more traditional way that we've done so many times in the past. What becomes of the store and Incarna is something that's not a big priority right now, but there may come a time when it makes sense to revisit that.
Certainly we've learned a lot about virtual goods and we're taking that learning into the team. But we've also brought some new team members into the Dust project who have more experience on that kind of model to make sure we do better.
Sony has had no influence on the restructuring at all. We are publishing Dust exclusively on the PS3 and Sony is very committed to helping us market Dust to the PlayStation 3 audience. That's their role in the situation.
"I absolutely considered [resigning] but I think that frankly it would have been an easy way out."
It's a danger of having gone from success to success for such a long time. We've consistently bucked the trend with Eve now for eight years. Eve as an initial creation was an almost impossible feat and we've carried that through the years, growing each year. It frankly made me arrogant and making a change to the game as we did over the summer - in the way that we did - led to taking a look at the whole company as a result. We've done a lot of retrospectives leading up to this moment and it's been an ongoing process ever since August/September.
I just realised that I needed to look more closely at myself and go back to a different time when we were closer to our products, making decisions more in line with their benefits - and not for the benefit of our very ambitious strategic plan.
I absolutely considered that but I think that frankly it would have been an easy way out. Being accountable for this type of situation, leading the company into this position, it's also my responsibility to lead us out of it. I've had support from employees in doing that. I've now learned a life lesson from going through this and I hope that will make me a better CEO in the future.
CCP has always been run as a company where all information is available to everyone. Fearless [CCP's internal newsletter] is an example of that where we have public discussions about really hard questions. To see that turned on the company was very disappointing. But we can't make one incident completely change us.
Obviously the company was not on a great course at the time and we needed to do something about it - but this was not a good way to point that out. To use that as a tool against the company was really disappointing to see, especially for the people who make and participate in the discussions. It was sad to see that being turned on people. A strength of our culture is to be open about things and I don't think there's a lot of information at CCP that people don't have access to. It was sad to see that being turned around and used to damage the company.