CCP today announced they are moving away from Virtual Reality to refocus their core business to PC gaming and the up and coming mobile sector.
As part of this, the Atlanta and Newcastle offices will be closing, as they handled VR R&D and Valkyrie Development respectively.
Of the current staff of 370, about 100 will be affected, and this includes some staff in Reykjavik as well. Notable departures so far include CCP Logibro and CCP Manifest. CCP Manifest was based in the Atlanta office, and was the primary PR contact for CCP. CCP Logibro (Community Developer) is familiar to Eve players from his work on the Alliance Tournament and CSM, as well as being a regular on the CCP Twitch streams, and proactive in interacting with the community.
In an interview with Icelandic site mbl.is (Google translated version here), CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson laid out some of their plans for the future, and the reasoning behind this move. Whilst CCP have had success with the VR market, and still have faith in the sector, they expect there to be a slowdown in the market for the next few years. Once the next wave of VR uptake comes along, CCP will be well positioned to come back into the market and lead again.
In the meantime, they will refocus their efforts onto PC games, as well as branching out into the burgeoning mobile sector. There was a taste of this new direction at Vegas when they introduced the new mobile game Project Aura. According to Hilmar CCP have been monitoring the growth of complex mobile games in the Chinese and South Korean markets, and he believes this is the direction game development will take in the West as well in the short to medium term.
CCP Falcon has posted on the Eve-O forums to reassure players that the Eve Development team are not affected by these changes, and CCP Badcop posted on Reddit to say that Project Nova is still continuing.
At the moment, this is a developing story, and details of who is leaving, and the changes themselves are still emerging. We will update you as more information becomes available.
