EVE Online‘s Senior Producer Jon Lander understands the mistakes his company has made and takes responsibility for them. “Ultimately, whatever happens in EVE comes down to me,” he said in a recent interview with Gamasutra.
Lander repeats earlier sentiments voiced by CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson that CCP got too complacent in its belief that it could do no wrong, leading to several well-publicized fiascos over the last year:
“We’ve just got to make sure that we don’t take our success for granted, which I think is where we ended up as we were going through last year. We could do anything; it didn’t matter what it was. It would work. I think everyone in the company has learned some really, really valuable lessons about that. Now, it’s very much that we don’t take anything for granted.”
CCP’s continuing design philosophy with EVE is to provide things for the players to do without specifically herding them in a certain direction, a “bottom-up” approach. He even goes so far as to say that EVE is a “social engine” and “not our game anymore,” especially with regards to the viewpoints expressed by the Council of Stellar Management.
This approach is also emphasized by the fact that CCP only has four content developers for EVE, but loads of programmers and engineers that put the tools into the game to allow players to drive the content, which has allowed it to stay relevant, and even grow, for as long as it has.
