Case Study
CCP Games: EVE Online
July 2008
The Challenge
As the publisher of EVE Online®, CCP Games™ has established itself as one of the leading companies in the field of massively multiplayer games. Founded in 1997, the company’s mission is to attract and retain customers by providing top quality online entertainment. As an industry-leading pioneer of single-server persistent universe architecture, CCP Games is known for pushing the envelope and breaking new ground at all levels and is focused on retaining a trusting relationship with its players.
With a quarter of a million players, EVE Online is a sophisticated, strategic game in which thousands of players cooperate and compete. With many players already using 3rd party voice chat services to communicate, CCP Games saw the integration of voice chat as a way to drive retention by delivering a more immersive experience that would strengthen social networks and enhance players’ ability to plan and coordinate.
CCP Games has long relied on the use of its own internally developed technology. So when they made the decision to add voice chat, Executive Producer Nathan Richardson, then Senior Producer for EVE Online, asked the company’s VoIP experts to research the requirements for launching and managing the service in-house. They soon realized that the costs, risks, and complexity were too significant to justify moving forward with an internal solution.
The Solution
In making the unusual decision to outsource, CCP Games evaluated several 3rd party voice chat solutions and determined that Vivox was the only provider that offered the extensive features, high level of integration, seasoned operations team, and massive scalability they required.
“Vivox was the most logical choice to provide us with the integration and control we needed to ensure a dynamic, immersive experience for our player community,” explained Richardson. “And with its experienced and responsive operations staff, Vivox enabled us to get to market faster with minimal costs and resources so we could focus on building game content.”
Richardson’s team leveraged Vivox’s flexible tools to tightly integrate voice chat into EVE Online’s existing controls, social structure, and game situations, considerably enhancing ease of use and immersion relative to the third party applications many players were using.
Scalability and performance are always top of mind in EVE Online, since unlike other MMOGs, the entire player base plays in a single universe that is not broken into ‘shards’. Vivox’s operating expertise and ability to massively scale assured Richardson and his team that the company could deliver a high quality voice experience for its players without impacting game server performance.
And with the upcoming launch of its next-generation graphics engine, timing was key. Vivox’s hosted service, professional services team, and easy to use tools enabled EVE Online to incorporate voice chat without impacting their release cycle.
The Results
Since EVE Online launched its voice chat service in October 2007, feedback from users has been positive and adoption has been significant. By providing a common communications platform across corporations and alliances within the game, the Vivox voice service has also proven to drive player participation in events such as EVE Live Dev Blogs. Vivox has hosted sessions for EVE Online where peak attendance has been as high as 3,000 participants.
As Richardson noted, “Our players are finding Vivox’s integrated voice chat easier to use and much more powerful than the third party applications they were using before.”
Ongoing maintenance has also been simple, with Vivox taking full ownership for managing the hosted, carrier-grade voice service so Richardson’s team can concentrate on developing content. Vivox also works with EVE Online’s development team on an ongoing basis to launch new features, rolling them out without impacting the company’s six month development cycles.
“Vivox allowed us to implement the voice chat we wanted for our players quickly and cost-effectively, driving retention by enhancing the EVE Online experience,” said Richardson. “We see voice becoming an increasingly integral part of online gaming, and with the success we’ve had with EVE Online we plan to integrate Vivox into future games as well.”
Case Study: CCP
