Just About EVE Online Season 2?

Not all EVE Online news is published at eveonline.com. I check out the corporate site every so often as the frequency of press releases has increased over the last year or so. Last week CCP Games published a press release about a topic I had no idea even existed.

Announcing Just About EVE Online: Season Two

After a year in which Just About has paid out thousands of dollars in rewards to its EVE community alone, CCP Games and Just About are delighted to renew their partnership for an even more ambitious ‘second season’.

Just About’s innovative bounty system offers real-money rewards for what other platforms expect members to do for free, like sharing knowledge, building guides, or just enthusing about what they love.

Members benefit, and so do valued partners like CCP. In return for a fund for bounties - at a fraction of the typical marketing budget - Just About encourages the creation of amazing, authentic content, all at higher rates of quality and quantity per member than anywhere else.

In the past year, Just About EVE members have:

• Made guides and resources, ranging from an EVE Online glossary and third-party tool list to a fleet etiquette manual and a gank-avoidance masterclass.
  
  
• Created in-game content: ship-fitting guides that started on Just About and are now playable and immortalised in the EVE Online universe.
  
  
• Embraced creative projects, including amazing fanfiction, photo-essays, mockumentaries, propaganda, art, screenshots, shanties, and limericks.

The second season kicks off with the culmination of our Mystery bounty in a moment that’s been teased since the season began. Live today, a whopping $500 reward will tempt EVE players on a series of fiendish challenges both within the game and beyond, showing off new heights of our bounty system’s capabilities.

“Rewarding our community with Just About has been brilliant, we can't wait for another year! Bounties have enabled us to bring our fans so much closer, make them feel more valued and even increased applications to our Creator Program. It's been fantastic.” - Grant Tasker, Brand Director - CCP Games

The best content and conversation around EVE Online is happening on Just About, and its creators are getting rewarded for it. Isn’t it time you joined them? www.justabout.com.

Honestly I had never heard of Just About and the description in the press release didn't help a whole lot.

About Just About

Just About is a new community platform that rewards passionate communities for the value they create. The platform was founded on the belief that everyone who invests their time, knowledge and passion into a community should be rewarded fairly and treated like a partner in the community they have helped to build and grow.

I clicked on the link and what I found reminded me of one of those shady RMT currency sites. You know, the ones I used to cover back in the day where customers risked getting banned from their favorite video game.

As of the writing of this post, in addition to the $500 Mystery bounty, the site is offering a $7 prize for the best inexpensive cruiser/battlecruiser fit and $70 from editing some EVE: Vanguard game play footage posted on the site.

I did not have much luck finding information about the website. GamerIndustry.biz did an interview with the founder of the company, Rupert Loman, in November 2022. Loman was the founder of Eurogamer, GamesIndustry.biz and the sites' parent company Gamer Network (now owned by ReedPop). He left Gamer Network back in 2020.

From the press release, I get the impression that CCP Games is helping fund what Just About calls a Treasury for the game. Here is what Loman told GamerIndustry.biz in the interview.

"On a platform level, we're trying to build a model that's sustainable and that works and is clear for users," he explains. "So we've built a model based on a 50/50 split of revenues.

"If we bring in a big commercial partnership, half that money goes into the Treasury for that community. If content that's created generates advertising revenue and other revenues, 50% of that also goes back to the creators and people that have contributed to that. So yeah, it's about being transparent in those numbers in terms of what that will mean for an individual user."

When I take into account CCP's attitude towards blockchain gaming, partnering with a platform to monetarily reward content creators seems in line with its corporate character. Also, to say CCP's CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson is a bit of a dreamer who believes in the social aspects of video games, especially around the EVE IP, is probably a bit of an understatement. Hilmar trying to get onto the ground floor of any new idea, be it virtual reality, blockchain gaming, or social platforms, is totally in character. The only surprise is I haven't heard of this platform until I visited the CCP Games corporate website.