With a16z's interview with CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, the thought of monetizing third party applications has come to the fore. Project Awakening is going to rely, in part, on gas fees to fund the game and fuel the cryptocurrency economy. But let's look at games at the other end of the spectrum. Games that need the third party apps but don't really want to support them. According to videos I've watched over the past 24 hours, one such game is Elite: Dangerous. Last week, perhaps its most important third party website closed its doors.
The website in question is Elite Dangerous Data Base (EDDB). To give EVE players an idea of the state of Elite: Dangerous' in-game tools, imagine that instead of going to a regional market board to look up market details, players had to visit each individual station. That is what players in ED have to do. Or did until the creator of EDDB opened the doors to his application in 2015. And perhaps now will have to do again.
Several videos are up on YouTube describing the situation. The one that caught my attention was by TheYamiks, although I'll embed the video from ObsidianAnt as I feel it gives a more succinct explanation of the situation.
The developer Themroc left a farewell message on the website. I thought some of his thoughts merit saving considering the ideas floating around today.
Right after the launch of Elite: Dangerous I noticed that good 3rd party tools were rather scarce and so I quickly realized that I wanted to develop a tool to find profitable trade routes in particular. At that time we didn't have access to Frontier's API or the Journal and had to acquire all price information via image text recognition (OCR). This was, of course, extremely error-prone. Even then, the main work in developing EDDB was to clean up data errors.
Over the years, we as a 3rd party community have received more and more support from Frontier Developments, and they deserve thanks for that. Unfortunately, it was often the case that we also had to fight hard for one or the other concession. Personally, I always felt like Frontier was just putting as much energy into support as was just acceptable. To date, some data points such as powerplay updates or installation information are simply not provided and have to be painstakingly and error-prone manually entered via self-created backends. And the data, which is provided, is regularly incorrect or faulty. It was and is frustrating.
With EDDB, I developed the platform through which a lot of data was collected, and what actually annoyed me the most was the fact that I could never really focus on developing great applications with the data, but that it was primarily about getting and cleaning this data first. Because that task alone was immense with my own very high standards for quality. I hope this also explains why running the website is not just a matter of hosting, but requires a lot of effort.
The reasons why I quit EDDB are complex and my personal development plays the main role here. But Frontier Developments is not entirely innocent in this. I know that other game developers shower their 3rd party community with support. Unfortunately, I often felt the contrary with Elite: Dangerous.
From what I gather, CCP Games showers support upon EVE's third party development community compared to what Frontier Games provides with Elite: Dangerous. But the story of EDDB leads to concerning thought for games like Project Awakening. Will developers, in order to get those sweet, sweet gas fees, skimp on adequate in-game tools in order to encourage third party developers to step in? And if so, what happens to a company's revenue stream when key third party developers decide to move on with their lives? Hopefully that is something that CCP Games and those wishing to emulate that model remember and take into consideration.
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