I sat down with David Reid, Chief Marketing Officer of CCP Games, and discussed "the most dangerous, complicated and rewarding journey in video games."

Is there anything specific you're especially proud of while marketing EVE?

I'll give you a couple things! Ya know, one of the first things that I think of is Retribution last year (our winter expansion last year). It was the single most successful expansion that EVE has ever had in terms of raw, new, and returning people adding to the game, and it is what propelled us over 500,000 worldwide subscribers. It was an awesome thing. Some of that is just doing the basics of marketing, and getting great key art, and doing a good campaign and such&...but I think one of the things that fundamentally really drove Retribution to a higher level was the trailer.

When you watch that trailer for Retribution, it is utterly different than anything else we've done. A lot of trailers, like our Inferno trailer or Odyssey trailer, they have a lot of that kind of…space opera, beauty, poetry going for them, right? Whereas Retribution was like "This is a gamer's story", right? "This is Vic; he just made the mistake of his life!" *verbal sound effects* And you watch the story, and you're kinda like "As a gamer, I can get excited about this!" Maybe I'm a guy who has been aggressed on in other games, and I like the idea that I can get a bounty hunter to go take the guy out that screwed me. Or maybe I'm one of those guys who likes screwing with other people, and I think I can stay one step ahead of the law and I kinda like the idea that they're upping the ante a bit! And Retribution just, ya know...the whole package came together at a great time with that trailer like the official 'starting gun'. It's not enough to just do great things in the game, it's really important to send the right message about what you're doing. Because, people – and gamers in particular – we have all kinds of choices, we have all kinds of options, there's no shortage of things out there competing for our attention even outside of games. In order to really break through, you can't just rely on great product, you have to have a great way of talking about it...and I think that's really what we at our team in marketing succeeded in doing with the Retribution trailer.

I would have to tell you, I'm also very proud of the Collector's Edition. This is a different game, and a different idea, because EVE has never had a proper Collector's Edition. Today, a game launches, and there's a collector's edition on day one, but...ten years later, EVE has never really had one. It was an effort to sort of comb the history of the company; we said "let's not just make a collector's edition for EVE Online, let's make a collector's edition that is a bit of a 'historical document of CCP'." We have a 190 page hardcover of the history of the game and the company; we've got a copy of the board game, The Danger Game, the first time it's ever been localized into English. This is the game that was made in Iceland, and has only been published in Icelandic until now, which funded EVE Online. This was a group of 30 Icelanders who had no money to make a game, and sold their board game "Hættuspil" in Iceland...they sold 15,000 units, and they had enough money to make an MMO. It's just kind of a funny little thing to look at historically, like...without this 'silly little board game'...and again, you see EVE fingerprints in it. There's a very serious sandbox-y idea in there with a simple set of rules, and from there the players just do what they wish (often times, to the chagrin of the other players). That really has made a difference in EVE, and it just felt like an important historical moment to get out there for gamers, so...we're super happy about how this has come together, and on top of all those other things in there, one of the things we've added in was what we've called the CCP mystery code.
 

I was-
Yeah!
 

I was just gonna ask about the mystery code!

And that was going to get us to Rubicon! *laughs* So, the mystery code...the idea here is that...it's not just a Collector's Edition for EVE Online, but it is a collector's edition for the EVE universe. It isn't just the first ten years that we celebrate, it's the next 10 years we're looking at as the second decade...and we expect DUST to be a big part of that...and we weren't at a place where we could speak about Valkyrie precisely at FanFest...but always knew that once we were ready, we were gonna put something for Valkyrie in there. The EVE universe is a living, breathing thing...it grows every year, and we're gonna keep adding more things to it, there's gonna be...ya know, EVE expansions every year, there's gonna be DUST expansions, there's gonna be new games like Valkyrie. With that mystery code, you can rest assured you're always going to have a piece of that when it happens. You're never going to have to feel like "Oh, I missed something." ya know...it's a very forward thing that, first, ties in nicely to Rubicon.
 

How far forward have you guys looked toward what the mystery code is gonna be for?

We have a lot of ideas...let me say this! Let me say this! 'Cause I can say this without getting myself into any trouble, umm...it is a mystery code that is...we have deliberately called a CCP – it is not an EVE universe – mystery code, and so whenever we are doing big things...in the EVE universe or with other games...
 

Just "CCP".

Exactly. So you can expect it to tie in to...World of Darkness and ultimately to other things.
 

Is that something that people are going to be able to somehow attain later? Like, if they miss out on the mystery code from the Collector's Edition, are they going to be able to pick one up somehow? (eg from an in-person event, etc.)

What I would say to that, ahh...we are looking at a lot of ideas on this front. Mission one for me is get the Collector's Edition sold and ready, and we'll just see from there. I expect we will find a way to do this.