Those two investment groups put $30M into EVE and it's not because of the stellar game. It's for the development of VR as the next big direction in social media. EVE is a game that happens to be a fully developed social media platform as an evolution of the paying customers love of the game. All that's needed next is a virtual input detector so you can fling pages around with your hand, browse the internet, do data entry, check boxes and press OK or cancel. Then tie that together with your smart phone, tablet or a sensor array in a room with a micro processing unit.
Space ships are tailor made to evolve virtual reality and virtual input controls.
Free to play arenas in this game turned out to have a hoard of freeloaders when Hitech shut them down who were never going to subscribe while free was involved.
No they were shut down because the coad was hacked. HTC pulled the plug on it to bring the software totally back under their control. With that coad now tightened up they gave us the "custom" arenas, but only paying subscribers can build and use them.
With this "free" setup they wouldn't have their own little worlds like the old system had, they would be mixed in with everyone else in the MAs. This would bolster the numbers. As we all know, players go to where the numbers are. Sure some would be happy with the half dozen high ENY planes and a couple of GV, but I think many would either get tired of those limited rides or being out matched so often, that they would pony up for the subscription, after all its only 50 cents a day.
