CCP Warns of Companies Growing Too Fast

I am an American.  All around me are companies started by individuals or small groups only to explode to huge corporate-sized entities within a few years.  CCP, the company most famously behind EVE Online and Dust 514 started off very small itself.  Despite the success of its open-space game and linked shooter, the Iceland-based company is wary of growing too large or too quickly.  As CEO Hilmar Petursson put it,

There’s a lot of focus on learning when you have a bigger company, to make sure the entire system is learning. The biggest shift was realizing that. A big company can become very dumb, very quickly. The larger the group of people becomes, the more you lose efficiency, fluidity, creativity, and innovation, unless you structure it very well.

The words are honestly refreshing to hear, and may explain part of how EVE Online has proven so successful as to still be going as strong as ever ten years after going online.  Given the modern industry’s focus on the mass market and high game budgets, having a company with a decade-long sustained game community and still with obvious room to grow its product without necessarily growing its bureaucracy proves the model currently being used by most gaming companies is not the only option.

The point is particularly relevant with the recently-expressed frustrations of proponents of the Xbox One’s original anti-used game DRM.  Both Cliff Bleszinski and Adrian Chmielarz (at right) have stepped forward to express their certainty the current model of game design and publishing simply cannot exist at the same time as a used games market.

While they specifically keep the conversation focused on used games with their insistence, the larger issue is one simply of cost.  Games cost too much to make, and the current model, as Adrian correctly asserts, is inherently unsustainable.

Not every game publisher can create EVE Online.  It is still good to know CCP is being careful to avoid becoming every game publisher.