There’s a new entrant in the rapidly growing market for retail cards and virtual goods for online games today: the Zeevex Virtual Currency Exchange. The coin of the realm is Zeev Tokens, which can be purchased via retail cards sold at thousands of brick-and-mortar stores, redeemed and stored online, where it can be used to buy virtual goods from participating partners’ games.

There are several such card services out there already, but the fairly unique hook here is that gamers can exchange these tokens with each other, on the Zeevex web site and on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. This opens up the possibility of Zeev currency being used not just to purchase game content, but to barter for real-world items.

“The biggest traction is going to be collectible items” like comics and sports cards, predicted Zeevex Chief Marketing Officer Dean Gebert. The Atlanta/Palo Alto-based company has a seed-round valuation of seven figures, he added, and their retail distribution partner is InComm. Sounds like a great idea, if Zeevex can also partner with some popular games. Gebert tells me they plan to announce seven of those in coming weeks, so stay tuned.

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This is very similar to what PlaySpan is up to with its Ultimate Game Card. For more perspective on their product, read about their recent deal with hi5 or their acquisition of Spare Change.

According to the press release, the Zeevex Digital Lockers will include social network plug-ins (for Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Bebo) so users can trade Zeev Tokens with anyone but also provide parental controls and support for micro-transactions as low as 5 cents.

Zeevex recently closed an undisclosed, private round of funding and is led by Ron Williams (CEO), Dean Gebert (CMO) and Robert Sanders (CTO). While the company would not go into detail on the financing round, it did say its seed round valuation was seven figures and that they are considering a VC-backed Series A round this Summer.

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When The MMO Gamer was invited to visit Hi-Rez Studios for a sneak peak at their upcoming game, Global Agenda, I was very interested in the prospect of going.
But, before we get into that, let me tell you a little about the game itself, and the people who are going to bring it to us.
Hi-Rez Studios is a US-based company located in the state of Georgia, just outside of Atlanta.
Founded in 2005, they have grown to become a large-scale operation, drawing away employees from several other MMO studios.
The CEO of Hi-Rez is a man named Erez Goren. His dream was to create his own video games, and now he’s trying to make good on it.
Erez started writing software back in the late 1980s, with one of the first a baseball games for the Atari 400. After college he started a number of successful business ventures, using the proceeds to found Hi-Rez.
Helping make Erez’s dream come true is a group of around fifty people headed by Todd Harris. Todd, whose office is decorated with spy movie posters, is the executive producer for the game.
Enough about Hi-Rez! Let us take a tour of Global Agenda. My very first impression of Global Agenda, from skimming the website and watching some in-game movies, was that it was just another Unreal Tournament clone.
But, having seen it now in person, Global Agenda goes above and beyond what Unreal is. Using their own motion capture studio to do all the animations, Hi-Rez is making a unique game built on the Unreal 3 engine. Michal Adam, the public relations manager, even pitched in and did the animations for the female medic, which is her favorite class.
GA is set in the future of Earth. The current governments of today have faded away, and new powers seek to control the citizens. Technology has progressed leaps and bounds, especially in the field of robotics. Although there are new governments, like the controlling Commonwealth, Global Agenda characters will be working for companies called Agencies. These Agencies are built of people banded together to try and take over the world in epic campaigns.
Built up on four founding layers of gameplay, Global Agenda is trying to provide something for everyone.
The first layer is action. Each class provides a different way to play, and each mission gives you a wide variety of things to do.
The second layer is character development. With the inclusion of the RPG-style elements you can create a wide variety of characters not seen in traditional FPS games. This can branch into fun for the traditional roleplayer, by having to build your character, or frustration for the traditional FPS player, by not having access to all the cool guns.
The third layer is teamwork. With goals in each mission and for each agency you will get to work with friends to accomplish things you wouldn’t be able to by yourself.
The final layer will be the large-scale warfare. With 45-day campaigns, or seasons, Agencies will compete with each other to be the best and bring honor and fame to their members. Something a player who prefers to solo may not get to experience.
Characters are created from four base classes. The weapon-master Assault class, wielding anything from rocket launchers to miniguns is the damage dealer. Engineers are the masters of robotics, they can throw down a shield to protect teammates from fire while deploying deadly turrets. Medics run behind their teammates healing them and engaging in biological warfare against their enemies. And, the last thing you ever see could be the stealthy Recon class; equipped with a sniper rifle and invisibility cloak.
Each class has more than enough skill options to give them a wide variety, leaning towards eight or more unique builds in total. Each character has a family name. This “family” includes your entire, account and ensures all of your characters are in the same Agency, fighting for the same goals.
Each comes with their own jet pack for quick travel on maps, and has their own specialties. But, with only four to choose from you may feel a bit limited when creating a new character.
These agencies set the central theme of the fast action Player vs. Player for the game. You can freelance yourself if you desire, but the most rewarding action comes from the Agency battles. With groups of around 10 you fight for and defend key points on a larger map.
The larger-scale battles are alliance against alliance, or Agency vs. Agency. These larger battles are part of 45 day campaigns that Agencies participate in to win prestige and awards for themselves and their members. Each “season” provides a goal to accomplish for teams and provides bonuses if they dominate.
Even if nobody from your agency or alliance is online for you to fight with, Global Alliance provides players options to freelance for the government and join groups of random players to fight with and against. Even though PvP is the central theme for an FPS-style game, there is a support role for your characters in the Player vs. Environment.
PvE is used for orientation of new members, class missions for learning how to use upgrades, and learning team building skills. With such little PvE, some casual players may find themselves out of the loop.
All this talk about PvP casual players may be thinking, “I’m no twitch gamer there is no way I can compete with all the 13 year old players!” Well, Global Agenda has added a few things to deal with this. Not only is there a rich RPG-style character progression to gain better equipment but high-end characters as well as low-end characters are limited to how much gear can be used in a match.
Leveling in the game gives you access to new weapons and abilities, but you can’t use them all in every battle. With such limits, the long time player may have access to some of the better weapons in game but they will be limited on some of the smaller items like mines or grenades which are also essential to a well rounded game.
GA also has a well implemented melee system that is useful and easy to learn. When the other team deploys a projectile shield you better get in close with your battle-axe and tear them up. When playing with the experienced alpha testers I found melee a nice twist to the traditional FPS game that gives more depth and gameplay to the normal point and shoot of the genre.
Global Agenda does a nice job of blending RPG and FPS to create a game that anyone can jump in casually and play a good game. The depth of character building and agency campaigns will allow you to enjoy the game for a long time to come. Even after playing an hour with the alpha testers I am very excited about the ease one can get into Global Agenda.
Offering aspects of traditional games that allow most gamers, casual to experienced, to have a place to play brings a lot to the table.

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In the current economic climate, it’s hard to find a company with good news to share. And the volatile MMO business might be the last place you’d look.

Yet Iceland-headquartered CCP, developer of EVE Online, is not just healthy, but growing, seeking 60 new hires, says North America president Mike Tinney. “We’re in a pretty strong position these days, and it’s refreshing to be able to say that in today’s economy.”

Amid the challenges faced by the Icelandic economy, CCP is a “safe harbor,” Tinney says. While employees in the hard-hit region face personal hardship, CCP as a company is bringing capital into the company. Asked about reports that the company may move its headquarters, Tinney says, “I would classify that as a rumor.”

One factor in the company’s continued stability is its self-sufficiency, Tinney tells Gamasutra. “We publish our own content, we design our own content, we control our billing relationships, we control our hosting relationship.”

“We have partnerships in place, but we’re not a traditional developer-publisher relationship, where the publisher oftentimes has problems controlling the content pipeline, and the developer often has problems controlling or influencing their delivery to the customer, or their interface with the customer,” he says. “I think that has helped us out a lot over the years.”

Know Your Players — Really

Of course, not everyone can so easily maintain that kind of independence. But Tinney says there are other lessons other MMO developers might glean from EVE Online’s success — namely, the idea that it’s not necessarily the size of your userbase, but your relationship to them.

At last count, EVE has 236,000 users, each of whom has on average two characters per account. The game’s also in its single-shard server — which means close to 500,000 different characters are sharing a single world built on galactic conflicts and a complex virtual economy. Real-world economist Dr. Eyjo Guðmundsson conducts high-level studies of the socioeconomics of the player base.

“It really is a relentless dedication to tracking the playing trends of the people in EVE and constantly working to provide them with the experience that they’re looking for,” says Tinney. “That’s created a very strong community, a very loyal community, and one that sort of feeds onto itself and gains momentum.”

CCP, which is focusing on EVE, although it bought White Wolf in 2006 and is reported to still be working on a World Of Darkness MMO, claims that its space sim never launched with a high target for user numbers. In fact, it launched to a difficult but all too common set of circumstances — almost immediately after launch, publisher Simon & Schuster made an exit from the games biz.

Stranded but persistent, CCP bought back its publishing rights and focused solely on meeting the needs of the 25,000 players with which it started. These days, a game once considered at best niche or a cult hit continues to experience steady growth.

“We have a pretty competitive churn,” says Tinney. “A lot of MMOs launch at a very high water mark, and then through a series of expenses and efforts fight to retain an ever-decreasing pool of subscriptions.”

Don’t Worry About WoW

And because CCP’s goal has never been to try to compete with market-dominant World of Warcraft, Tinney’s able to note that Blizzard’s high tide has actually lifted all boats.

“[WoW] has made this kind of game a household name, and a mainstream form of entertainment,” Tinney says. “Otherwise, I think most other games and virtual worlds would be considered niche entertainment.” WoW’s success, Tinney maintained, increased the field and the public awareness around MMOs.

This raises an interesting principle, though. As an example, Mythic Entertainment was not shy about confronting WoW with Warhammer Online and had a successful launch week with 1.5 million units shipped to retail and 500,000 registrants. To date, though, the fact that Warhammer has just 300,000 paying subscribers is considered a disappointing performance for the game, which has subsequently let support staff go.

So why are WAR’s 300,000 users a disappointment, while EVE’s 236,000 are a success? “Everybody defines their success in their own ways,” notes Tinney. “It’s very hard to make an MMO, and very challenging to find something that hits the right wavelength for a community of participants and then manages to retain them.”

EVE was also launched at a more modest budget than Warhammer and other games like it,” says Tinney — and there are other challenges inherent in going up against WoW. “It’s very difficult to launch a new game in this environment and have it compete with a game that launched five years ago — and in a state of success has continually upgraded,” he says.

“You have to make those upgrades in a state of speculation, in the hopes you’ll achieve the type of success that preexisting games have already created for themselves.”

Skip The High Targets

In order for an MMO to be a success and for its developer to stay fiscally sound, then, is the better strategy to start small, developing strong relationships to the userbase and focusing on retention rather than big-number targets. “I do personally and I know that CCP overall [agrees],” says Tinney, “and I humbly say that we’re happy to see the rest of the industry coming around to that personally. I think that CCP has always regarded it as such.”

“A lot of MMOs that have beene out there for 4-plus years and developed a steady playerbase, those aren’t the ones you’re seeing layoffs in right now,” he says. “Even if you have only 100,000 people playing, if it’s a subscription model, you know what your income is going to be next month, and if you’re a prudent businessperson you build your company’s model within that framework.”

Advice Tinney would offer to startups launching a new online product? “I don’t think that I would start going after a million people, a million WoW players,” he says. “I would not try to launch a new virtual world that has no community support behind it against any of the large, established virtual communities,” he says.

“Because you’re not just competing against the program’s client –you’re competing against the social community that engages and supports that world,” he advises. “Set a very reasonable goal to build a very small community — don’t aim low, but build a biz model that supports an early-adopter mentality and then support the hell out of this community.”

“There’s a lot of strategies out there, and there’s so many ingredients in the recipe of a successful MMO any one of them can throw the whole thing off,” he adds. “But I think the community is one of the most important ingredients.”

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The Creative Coast Alliance (TCCa) and the Savannah Economic Development Authority (SEDA) today announced a deal for up to one year of free rent in the Game Development and Digital Media Center. The facility is Currently under development at the Class A office building on the Savannah River.

“Savannah has what game development companies need in talent, tech and quality of life,” said Brenda Brathwaite, game designer and chair of SCAD’s Interactive Design and Game Development Department. “In today’s economy when so many developers are laid off and looking for that silver lining, the Savannah offer is incredibly welcome and offers developers a chance to start a studio on more stable footing.”

TCCa and SEDA both noted that that Georgia’s Department of Economic Development recently expanded the Georgia Entertainment Industry Investment Act to include game development companies, giving them a 30% tax credit on related expenditures in Georgia. The Savannah region has over 17 regional colleges and universities, including the Savannah College of Art and Design, the Georgia Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech.

Those interested in the Game Development & Digital Media Center should visit theoffer.thecreativecoast.org.

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Monday, March 9
3:00 – 4:30
Skiles 002
Join us for a roundtable discussion with the designers of the FusionFall MMOG as they discuss how this complex game,
merging a variety of diverse cartoon properties was developed by a multi-national team.
Chris Waldron, Game Producer
Sam Lewis, Lead Game Designer
Mario Piedra, Creative Director
Matthew Schwartz, Mission Writer
Celia Pearce, Panel Moderator

www.fusionfall.com

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ATLANTA – (February 24, 2009) – Internap Network Services Corporation (NASDAQ: INAP), a global provider of end-to-end Internet business solutions, announced today its Performance IP™ network and Managed Server hosting services are playing an integral part in creating a breakthrough experience in the new massive multiplayer online (MMO) game Global Agenda, from Hi-Rez Studios. Global Agenda is currently in alpha testing with closed beta expected to begin in Q2, 2009.

Global Agenda is an action MMO using Unreal® Engine 3 set on Earth in the 22nd century. In the wake of a severe global disaster, player created factions, covert agencies and teams of elite special operatives, scheme against each other for power while simultaneously opposing a totalitarian world government bent on domination.

The Global Agenda unique style of gameplay combines the fast-paced action of a multi-player shooter, the character progression of an MMO and the player-driven territorial conflict of a strategy game. The game’s unique server architecture and “on-demand instancing” allows all players and agencies to compete within the same meta-game without being divided by computer servers — as is traditional in the MMO industry. For that reason, Hi-Rez Studios will be using Internap data centers services for Global Agenda in both North America and Europe.

“Given our game’s fast pace and huge scale, we needed a solution that offers the lowest network latency possible, while giving us great flexibility in managing spikes in demand,” said Stewart Chisam, vice president of game operations at Hi-Rez Studios. “The combination of Performance IP and Managed Server from Internap solves that problem for us and offers a scalable, secure and reliable technology platform to support the players of Global Agenda. Just a few years ago, network and server overhead precluded the development of this type of game. That has all changed. Global Agenda is a breakthrough game from both a technology perspective and a gameplay perspective, and we are very excited to bring it to market using Internap’s infrastructure services.”

Internap offers a unique, bundled solution of Performance IP networking, managed server and data center colocation that provides game developers a low latency networked infrastructure that is well suited for online games, particularly massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs). The solution is based on patented network optimization technology called MIRO (Managed Internet Route Optimizer™) and a data center and server platform that extends to 44 locations globally. Internap’s network services carry a 100 percent performance SLA (service level agreement) designed to support business critical websites and multi-media Internet applications.

“Since Internap was founded in 1996, it has always been a trusted supplier to the software and online gaming developer communities,” said Tim Sullivan, chief technology officer at Internap. “As software has begun to embrace a software-as-a-service delivery model and online gaming has created the massive multiplayer context, Internap’s low latency network services with integrated servers, storage, and data centers become even more relevant to these IT innovators.”

According to the Pew Internet & American Life project[1][1], more than one-half of US adults play video games, and about one in five play every day or almost every day. Age is closely related to gaming: More than four out of five US adults ages 18 to 29 said they were video gamers, while only 23 percent of respondents 65 and older said the same. Pew said men were slightly more likely than women to game, and urbanites were more likely to game than those in rural areas.

About Hi-Rez Studios, Inc.
Hi-Rez Studios, Inc. was established in 2005 to create exceptional online interactive entertainment. It is located just outside of Atlanta, GA. For more information, visit www.hirezstudios.com

Global Agenda, the Hi-Rez Studios debut title, is a fast-paced, action-oriented, massive multiplayer online game set in the Earth’s near future – a spy-fi world of advanced technology and player-driven conflict. To learn more visit: www.globalagendagame.com

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Registration is only $50 for the general public for two days.

Speakers are still being announced (as I get their bios and profiles in), but the line up is impressive already:
• Keynote Day 1: Jason Rohrer
• Keynote Day 2: Clint Hocking
• Audio Keynote: George “The Fat Man” Sanger
• Susanne Meiler (lead environment artist, Destineer)
• Mark Nelson (game designer and writer, Big Huge Games)
• Jason Arnone (art manager, Harmonix)
• Chris Rickwood (audio designer, musician, Rickwood Music)
• Ian Bogost (designer, critic, voracious book writer, GA Tech)
• Jon Jones (game artist, outsourcing expert)
• Lee Sheldon (game designer and writer, independent)
• Richard Dansky (designer and writer, Red Storm)
• Darius Kazemi (metrics guru and guy in orange shirt, Orbus Gameworks)
• Ian Schreiber (game designer and all purpose geek, Free Rule Design)
And more are still to be announced!

If you’re within driving distance of SCAD, please come join us. Well over 90% of the speakers are regular presenters at the Game Developers Conference, and you’ll find nothing else like this in the south.

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Hi-Rez is developing a new MMO called Global Agenda and it is looking to be something special for the MMO genre. I talked to Associate Producer and PR Specialist Michal Adam about the origins of Hi-Rez and their title: Global Agenda.

What are the origins of Hi-Rez Studios? How did it come to fruition?

Hi-Rez Studios was established in 2005 by Erez Goren; a long-time video game enthusiast. When he was younger, he used to write games for fun and one actually got published by Atari. We have it here in the studio – it’s a baseball game. But the video games industry took a hit in the mid-80’s and Erez went on to co-found a company with his brother called Radiant Systems.

Radiant focused on an intuitive Point-of-Sale system that is almost like a video game in itself integrating touch screen graphical terminals, customer service kiosks, and automated movie ticket stations. Under his guidance, it grew to be a publicly held company.

In 2005, after success in other entrepreneurial ventures, Erez invested his own money and pulled team members he’d worked with previously to start a new company – his own video game development studio. Today, Hi-Rez is a 45 member studio and entirely independent and self-funded.

Erez is not only the sole financial source behind the studio and game, but he is also the lead designer on Global Agenda. It’s unique for the financial source to be so hands on the project; Erez is usually the last person to leave the office, always trying new things like rebalancing weapons.

What is the goal of Hi-Rez Studios?

The goal is FUN. Because we are an independent studio, we are able to create games that are in line with our own vision. We also have the advantage of following our own production schedules and can therefore focus more on the quality of the game than the number of months or years that it takes to develop. But the number one thing on the first design document was “has to be fun.” We ensure this by deploying a daily build and testing internally almost every day. This allows for rapid prototyping and implementations of systems in the game

What facilities do you have? What kind of systems are you developing on?

Our facilities are quite nice – we have a spacious studio in a northern suburb of Atlanta. We are developing Global Agenda on the Unreal 3 Engine. Around the office, we mostly we use Dell XPS systems, but not everything was purchased at the same time and you’ll see a variety of PCs and specs at each developer’s work station.

You also have your own Motion Capture Studio?

We have a motion capture studio on site. Actually, we have one of the only motion capture studios in Georgia. The data we capture serves as a solid base movement for our animators. We’re also able to have a lot of fun with emotes and in-game movements, since we own the equipment (often developers have to rent motion capture facilities for their projects, which can get costly).

Georgia recently introduced a tax incentive to boost the entertainment industry. Can you explain that?

Something I think is true for most states is that they want to draw the entertainment industry to produce in their “backyard.” Think about how many jobs a project can create! For example, when a film is being shot in a location, it creates a need for various crews, set designers, local food catering for those on-set, actors, etc., which create lots of jobs around the film site.

The same is true for the gaming industry, and Atlanta has a really great pool of talent coming from local universities like Savannah College of Art and Design, Art Institute of Atlanta, and Georgia Tech, to name few. They produce highly skilled artists, programmers, and designers who, up until recent years thought they would have to go to California to get jobs in gaming. SCAD has a game design program; Georgia Tech has a Computation Media program too. There is a lot of talent coming out of the state.

The Entertainment Investment Act increased tax breaks for productions that were half a million dollars and higher to 30%. It is one of the most aggressive rates in the county! The EIA was something the Department of Economic Development pushed through. It’s very exciting; more companies are motivated to start in Georgia. Hi-Rez is proud to be Georgia’s largest homegrown game studio.

Are there any plans past Global Agenda yet?

The entire studio is focused on the single project. We really want to ship an excellent game and support the quality of Global Agenda.

It’s interesting to see a developer entirely funded by one source, and one who has their hands in every aspect of the game. Hi-Rez Studios looks to potentially become a major force in the development community. Look for the Global Agenda Q&A tomorrow, where GotGame learns more specifics about the first title from Hi-Rez Studios.

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As EVE Online continues its new promotional push, and prepares a free expansion and a debut boxed release, we spoke with the game’s in-game economist Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson.

Develop: You’ve got a very unusual job. For our readers that don’t know about your role, what are you responsible for in the EVE Online Universe?

Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson: There is nothing unusual about my job. What I do with EVE is to look at what players are producing, how they are producing it, where they are selling it, price trends, and social interactions among people. This is the same stuff that any economist would do analysing a real life economy. So the job is unusual? Not at all. Unusual setting? Definitely. I consider myself the luckiest economist in the world because I have a world of my own to research. So it is not an unusual job per se, but I’m just a very lucky guy.

Develop: How do players benefit from your work?

Guðmundsson: A lot of EVE is about the markets and the economy in the sense that they are trying to produce stuff that is needed to wage war in EVE. EVE is a completely player driven economy, so a spaceship is only flying in space because that player or another player has decided to build that ship. They have to take into account availability of resources when producing that ship. So the players benefit from the work that the research and statistics team does in a sense that it helps them to determine trends, gives them information about the economy and it’s just fun. Economic manipulation is fascinating gameplay and people are really starting to realize that now.

In summation, it helps players in their planning and it makes the game more fun.
Develop: What attracted you to in-game economics as opposed to real-word economics?
Guðmundsson: It was the experimental element of in-game economics. Within our world, even though it is a completely player-driven, there are still outside changes coming from the developers when we are adding new features into the game or tweaking game mechanics. So, even though we are not doing direct experiments in EVE, we know the upcoming changes and we can then watch what those changes do to the market. When a new patch or expansion is coming out, we have very closely documented the starting point and what we will change. Then we make a hypothesis about how it will affect the market and follow the results to understand if the market reacted the way we thought. This helps us better understand the effects of the changes we’ve made. So, as such, it is like a very large experiment that we can watch and see what how economics applies to social interactions online. So far I can say that I’m really intrigued by how the markets are in line with classic economic theory.

Develop: How do the challenges in real world economics compare to your experience with EVE Online?

Guðmundsson: There are some distinct parallel challenges existing in EVE Online and the ‘real world’ economy. In EVE, it is quite obvious that if you want to become a ‘big name’, you have to establish your own trust network. You have to be able to get people to work with you on a very well defined objective. You have to have a plan in place and you must make sure that your trust is not broken.

This is exactly what happened in real life in the sense that the banking system more or less failed through a lack of trust. In the same way, that happens in EVE once someone breaks the trust as we have seen in several cases in the past few months.

The big difference is that in EVE it is part of the game and it is what makes the game interesting – while consequences are a little bit more direct in real life. But that’s why I think monitoring EVE is very important, because we learn how to react to these trust breaches and failing institutions. I strongly encourage anyone who is interested in studying the current financial crisis to look at EVE Online as well.

Develop: Have you seen any sign that the real-world economic crisis currently so talked about is effecting EVE Online’s economy?

Guðmundsson: It is only affecting us in a positive way in the sense that we are seeing our subscriptions rise and a concurrent increase in activity. Increased activity always leads to interesting events in EVE because it is all about the players. EVE would be nothing if it didn’t have such an awesome subscriber base of very smart people trying to outsmart each other. It is an awesome, awesome thing to observe. So I would say that the connection between the current crisis and EVE Online is positive for EVE.

Develop: As a virtual business model, how does EVE Online rival other MMOs in terms of what it offers players?

Guðmundsson: Number one, two, and three I would say “depth”. You can play EVE for years and years and you are still discovering new possibilities of playing the game and new methods of participating in different social structures. There is no other game out there that offers you this depth and that would not be possible if we did not have the single shard approach. Having that approach gave us the opportunity to create a really vibrant environment that requires its own economy and its own social institutions.

Develop: Tell me about how you can counter the problem of uneven player distribution with an open economy like EVE Online’s. Has it been much of a problem?

Guðmundsson: My answer would simply be no, it hasn’t been a problem at all. Once we reached the critical mass of 50,000 subscribers, we were able to withdraw the sell and buy orders that CCP had in the markets. Today the only buy and sell orders on the market are the ones we use as currency sinks. We do not have to worry at all about player distribution in respect to the economy because the players will find each other and trade when needed.

The original design of EVE makes it such that resources are distributed unevenly in the universe. There is an asymmetric distribution of resources in a big universe of more than 5,000 systems broken up into 66 regions. You only see the market in that particular region. In order to build a spaceship you need to interact with people all over the EVE map. The initial design of the game is in my opinion so solid that this has never been a problem in the operation of the game once it reached a critical population mass.

Develop: Has EVE Online suffered at the hands of gold farmers and those looking to make real-world profits to the extent that famous examples like WoW has?

Guðmundsson: EVE Online has not suffered at the hands of ISK farmers, but we have seen through their gameplay that they are often trying to bend rules or exploit bugs in order to enhance their profits and thus have the potential to disrupt the market. However recent events have shown that the markets have become so big that it is difficult for any one person, or a handful of people, to disturb the markets to any great extent. This is the case even when they are exploiting at an industrial level. So the robustness of the EVE economy hasn’t been hurt in general.

We can see this in any black market sector in any other real life economy, it is there but it is not the main factor or significantly hurting the market (that of course might depend on where in the world you are). There is a black market in EVE, but it is not having any significant impact on the economy or gameplay. Of course there is always the nuisance from farmers who spam and use macros to chase available resources. We try to monitor them as best we can and are constantly working on new plans to catch them even sooner than we do today.

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